“It’s time to stop debating the issues surrounding climate change initiatives and focus instead on simple, realistic, cost-effective solutions. This is one area where an ounce of near-term prevention will be worth considerably more than a pound of cure later on.”
– Ken Lay, “Let’s Have an Ounce of Global-Warming Prevention,” December 1997.
“An ounce of global warming prevention is worth a ton of CO2 cure. There are no emergency rooms for a sick planet.”
– Edward J. Markey (D–MA), “Second Life Remarks to the Virtual Bali UN Climate Conference,” December 2008.
The New York Times and other media outlets have identified the principled free-market advocates Charles and David Koch as supporters of California’s Prop. 23, a measure to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).…
Continue ReadingOne of the most curious facts about energy is that economies continue to use more of it even as they use it more efficiently. This strikes us as strange because it has become an article of faith that making cars, buildings, and factories more energy efficient is the key to cheaply and quickly reducing energy consumption, and thus pollution.
But energy experts have never seen this as particularly mysterious. As energy historian Vaclav Smil notes, “Historical evidence shows unequivocally that secular advances in energy efficiency have not led to any declines of aggregate energy consumption.” A group of economists beginning in the 1980s went further, suggesting that increasing the productivity of energy would increase economic growth and energy consumption.
Efficiency advocates dismiss the evidence of rebound of energy use pointing to direct behavioral changes at the household or business level that are easiest to measure.…
Continue ReadingThe American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454, aka the Waxman-Markey climate bill) and the American Power Act (aka Kerry-Lieberman climate bill) both contained explicit provisions to create not just a U.S.-side cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide (CO2) but also a single, transatlantic emissions trading scheme.
The problem is that even if cap-and-trade is dead in the U.S. Senate, its advocates remain committed and have options for international action. The more this can be understood, the more the electorate can reject U.S.-side help for a futile, costly international scheme to regulate CO2 in the name of “stabilizing” climate.
A clear warning that supranational cap and trade was planned beyond the EU’s borders came in a speech last May by the European Commission official Jos Delbeke, Deputy Director General DG Environment.…
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