Joe Romm, founder of ClimateProgress (now part of ThinkProgress) at the Center for American Progress, is the bully man against anyone daring to challenge the narrative of man-made climate peril and the affordability of government-forced transformation away from mineral (dense) energies.
His ire has included two editorialists at the New York Times who are not buying climate catastrophe–Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat. But with the losing politics of carbon dioxide (CO2) rationing, not to mention the open scientific questions of climate sensitivity, these two opinion-molders have the high ground.
Bret Stephens
Romm lambasted the Times in 2017 for hiring “extreme climate science denier” Bret Stephens, a characterization that brought rebuke from the Washington Post and other Left outlets. [1]
Most recently, Romm complained about Stephens’s interpretation of Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Green New Deal as incrementalism.
…“The greatest threat we face — which will test our country, our democracy, every single one of us — is climate change. We have one last chance to unleash the ingenuity and political will of hundreds of millions of Americans to meet this moment before it’s too late.” (Robert O’Rourke, April 29, 2019)
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was facing criticism for being all meet-and-greet but with no ideas in his first month as a presidential nominee. “The big idea? Beto doesn’t have one,” opined David Siders at Politico. But a big idea would come two weeks later, supplementing the campaigner’s standard Obama-like fare of just favoring wind, solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, the Clean Power Plan, and the Paris climate accord. [1]
O’Rourke was a closeted keep-it-in-the-ground, anti-fossil-fuel Progressive during his unsuccessful Texas campaign for the US Senate last year.
…Back in 1996, the Cato Institute published the above two-volume treatise. Oil, Gas, and Government was the first (and still only) classical-liberal history of intervention in a major U.S. industry. I subsequently lectured on the book at Cato in Washington, DC and at a few other locals.
I recently ran across the outline/major points of my presentation, which I share below for those interested in the historical sweep of oil and gas regulation, tax policy, government ownership, and public grants.
To understand the perils of interventionism (particularly price controls and wartime planning), I document the coordination and problem solving in exploration/production, transmission/transportation, refining, and distribution/marketing. (Electricity, a separate energy industry, was not covered in the book.)
“Government Intervention in U.S. Oil and Gas Markets: Searching for ‘Market Failure’” (Synopsis of Major Themes of Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.
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