In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’
Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?
F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”
… Continue ReadingIf economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.
“Some good may yet come of this. A policy crisis over NAAQS regulation of man-made greenhouse gas would finally make clear that Massachusetts v. EPA created a constitutional crisis by authorizing the EPA to enact policies that the people’s representatives have not approved and would reject if proposed in legislation and put to a vote.”
Yesterday, June 25, 2012, I submitted the following comment on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions for New Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units, what EPA ideologically describes as the Carbon Pollution Rule. [1]
On behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non-profit public policy group specializing in regulatory issues, I ask that EPA withdraw the Proposed Rule on the following four grounds:
… Continue Reading1. The EPA’s proposal would effectively ban construction of new coal-fired power plants, a policy Congress has not approved and would reject if proposed in legislation and put to a vote.
“It’s not a coincidence that activist climate scientists don’t simply stop at defining the climate system and offering up even-handed, philosophically diverse thoughts…. They virtually invariably come to the very same policy proposals that are deeply left-leaning and are basically a carbon-repacking of a dozen other pre-existing, left-liberal policy dreams.”
A guest essay at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. by Garth Paltridge, Science Held Hostage in Climate Debate, zeros in on the problems plaguing climate science. I’ve made similar points over the years (see here and here), but Paltridge brings them together nicely. His post has attracted 500 comments to date, becoming a very hot topic among practitioners and laypersons alike in the blogosphere.
A retired Australian atmospheric physicist, Paltridge argues that the physical climate sytem is non-ergodic and inherently impossible to really understand fully.…
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