[Editor note: This exchange at the R-Street Institute website (no longer visible) is posted here and here.]
“From the Club of Rome to the present–with scientific models and articles in Science magazine from the ‘consensus’–the verdict has been wrong, wrong, wrong, and trending wrong. And this is before even considering (non-libertarian) public policy of taxes, tariffs, equity adjustments, private/public cronyism, etc.”
So why have neo-Malthusian natural scientists been so incorrect for so long? We have nearly a half-century of (falsified) doom-and-gloom.
Josiah Neeley of R-Street, once a critic of climate alarmism and wind power (see yesterday), is now desperately trying to make a case to libertarians and conservatives that the climate is in crisis and a carbon tax (and all the global government that goes with it) is necessary.…
Continue Reading“The debate over a carbon tax is now not just one of theoretical speculation; proponents need to explain why the U.S. outcome would be different from what actually happened in Australia.”
“Wind power simply cannot be scaled up to replace traditional energy sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear power….Wind subsidies might make a few people rich, but they won’t make wind a free market success story.”
– Josiah Neeley (below)
Time is relentless when it comes to the advantages from mineral-energy density and disdavantages from wind and solar intermittency. Such energy reality creates a sharp divide between consumer-chosen free-market energy and government-directed political energy. Or more bluntly, voluntary choice and coerced choice.
And when it comes to the carbon tax, real-world politics bats last, evicerating any theoretical scheme to implement a (God-like) revenue-neutral, equity-adjusted, border-adjusted carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax.…
Continue Reading“The top-down approach by many [Peak Oil] analysts tends to ignore the explanatory variables behind oil supply trends. [They] merely extrapolate recent trends, especially if they are declining. Oil prices, fiscal regimes, and other factors that influence investment and supply trends are ignored….”
“While it is true that the success of any given wildcat cannot be predicted, you can forecast that discoveries will continue to occur and that a certain percentage of exploratory wells will find oil. And where the resource base has a history of exploration, the confidence about discoveries grows, especially in terms of the success rate.”
Abstract: The presumption that the inability to predict a given oil field discovery translates into an assumption of no discoveries is a primary factor behind neo-Malthusian pessimism about oil supply. Given data for a basin, it can be safely assumed that a certain level of discoveries will continue.…
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