Editor Note: It was during Thanksgiving weekend 2009 that the unsettling oeuvre that became known as Climategate was disseminated. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” (Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009)

“They were shown: contriving to destroy inconvenient data in order to evade FOI inquiries; attempting to shut down scientific journals which published studies unhelpful to their cause; viciously bullying dissenters; even trying to rewrite history, for example, to erase the widely recognised Medieval Warming Period.” (James Delingpole, “My Finest Hour,” November 9, 2019)

Climategate lives in infamy. It remains a historic case study of agendas driving “science” rather than science informing agendas. Fourteen years ago, climate alarmists and friends of the involved scientists (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…

“Speculative incremental harm from a multi-decade global phenomenon has a classical liberal option: civil society charity. Uber-wealthy climate-related foundations can evaluate the harms to poor island villagers from sea level rise (as an example). But keep politicized science, global judicial activism, and backdoor Big Brother out of it.”

By 2004, after Jonathan Adler reversed positions to endorse climate policy activism, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) published a dialogue where Professor Adler defended his tort approach to address anthropogenic climate change with several classical liberals. Excerpts from “Global Warming: A Dialogue” follow.

This discussion is an edited version of comments made in December 2004 on the Free Market Environmentalism (FME) Roundtable list-serve. Jonathan Adler prodded his colleagues to forget, for just a minute, the debate over the impacts of warmer temperatures or whether humans are contributing or not.…

“… the knowledge problem and governance problems are intertwined.” (Kiesling, October 20. 2023)

Those eight words from an electricity technocrat dressed in classical liberal garb represent a major concession regarding the (governmental) centrally planned wholesale electricity markets, known as ISOs (Independent System Operators) and RTOs (Regional Transmission Organizations).

Before, Keisling only acknowledged governance. “Where the RTOs should have done better IMO is in governance, which is quite flawed but flawed differently in each RTO…”, to which I responded:

One question you have refused to answer: apply the knowledge problem to ISOs/RTOs. Can you do that for us all at substack? And not only Hayek–bring in Don Lavoie’s analysis on noncomprehensive planning, and the Austrian view of competition.

And now she has answered in part. It is not easy dealing with an assumption-making academic who seems to be hiding something from her classical liberal friends and sponsors.…

“Why is a conservative pro-development governor pushing for policies that are counterproductive to natural resource development?”

“The Alaska Energy Security Task Force report does not mention maximizing the use of the abundant energy sources we have in our state today, such as coal, in-state refining, or the incentivization of production in the Cook Inlet where, according to the USGS, we are not in a natural gas shortage situation.”

Alaska grift is reaching new levels to comport with the Inflation Reduction Act (aka Green New Deal). Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, all-in with Green Globalism, has appointed a energy security task force of cronies who lack real experience in or affinity with the state’s oil and gas sector. Instead of inciting investment in Alaska’s prolific resource base, Biden’s obstruction and subsidy bribery will risk making the state a federal enclave, with its top import being federal dollars.…