“Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several.”

– Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.

“The accumulation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly raising the global temperature and disrupting climate patterns, with implications for economic stability worldwide. Research and analysis at RFF supports informed policy design and negotiations to address climate change on national and international levels.”

– Resources for the Future website (2016).

Oh how Resources for the Future (RFF) has bought entirely into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation for fun and profit. The two quotations above, a quarter century apart, say much.

I was reminded of old-versus-new RFF by its press release last week tied to President Obama’s final state of the union speech.…

“The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it…. [H]e seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”

– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

A recent video is circulating where T. Boone Pickens ranted “I am the expert, not you” to land his point that falling demand, not increasing supply, is primarily behind the oil-price collapse. This outburst reminds me of the quote from the early 20^th century humorist Peter Finley Dunne: “It’s not so much what he doesn’t know that worries me, as what he does know that isn’t so.”…

“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…

“I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”

“The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, the Cooler Heads Coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, The American Enterprise Institute (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C. Marshall Institute, the State Policy Network, The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).… these front groups are snake pits for sociopaths.”

“Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have particularly distinguished themselves as candidates for corporate death.”

– Robert Kennedy Jr., “What States’ Attorneys General Can Do About Climate Deniers,” Huffington Post, October 1, 2014.

Robert Kennedy Jr.’s screed against great American corporations is an elitist indictment against consumer preferences for affordable, reliable energy. Kennedy’s hate speech is also a confirmation about how badly the climate fanatics are losing in the court of public opinion.…