“We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax. It all sucks.”

– John Podesta (Clinton campaign manager), January 2015.

“[A carbon tax is] lethal in the general [election], so I don’t want to support one.”

– Robby Mook (Clinton campaign manager), June 2015.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign would not touch it. Neither would be Democratic Platform in 2016. “[Hillary] Clinton has no intention of being suckered into a political disaster by advocating a carbon tax,” stated Democrat consultant
Paul Bledsoe in July 2016.

If Republicans will come out for it and vote for it, that’s a different matter. But until that happens, the Democrats should have nothing to do with it, because it’s political poison.” –

So if attention-hungry, anti-Trump Republicans (such as Mitt Romney) want to make a carbon tax an issue, be careful.…

There was shock, surprise, and humor in the media when Trump not only denounced wind “mills” for intermittency, lack of predictable value, property losses, and bird kills but also topped his discussion with

“They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Is President Trump correct in his five critical points? Even the last one? Or is it possible, as Trevor Noah suggested, turbines might be the only things that don’t cause cancer.

1. Intermittency

Electricity must be consumed the moment it is produced. Storage to allow deviations is prohibitively expensive in all but the rarest of settings. And it has always been this way.

Trump said, “Honey I’d like to watch TV tonight: are the turbines working?” And then his quotation from the Washington Republican fundraiser:

“Is the wind blowing?…

“Earth Hour not only coincides with Venezuela’s involuntary, chronic blackouts. It also joins this week’s complete, abject defeat of the Green New Deal. The 0 – 57 drubbing–with not a single Democrat voting “yes”–signals that self-made electricity blackouts will not be tolerated in the US.”

The joke goes: “What did the socialists use before candles.” The answer: electricity.

Such is true today in Venezuela, which is likely to encounter this Saturday’s Earth Hour (a turn-off-the-lights protest against modern living [1]) with an involuntary period of darkness. Atlas is shrugging under the Maduro regime, with electricity experts having fled to freer countries (a classic “brain drain”).

Venezuela is fiction-to-fact with Ayn Rand’s epic novel, Atlas Shrugged. But Rand in a previous book set up a fictional account of the fate of electricity in a dystopian world–what Earth Hour seems to long to bring about.…

Upon assuming the editorship of the Objectivist magazine Navigator, Robert Bidinotto wrote the following tribute to outgoing editor Roger Donway. Having worked with Roger over the last decade of my book projects, as well as many smaller things, I am pleased to republish Bidinotto’s salute.

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I cannot take the helm of this magazine without first paying tribute to the helmsman who has steered it so far, and so true.

I first encountered the name Roger Donway during the late 1960s, in the pages of The Freeman. His potent articles on political topics jumped out at me—not just for their rare clarity and logical rigor, but because he was one of the few among the magazine’s many authors who was clearly influenced by Ayn Rand. For a young, philosophically isolated, wannabe writer like me, Roger’s articles felt like an encouraging pat on the back—reassurance that someone, somewhere, was already able to do what I only aspired to do.…