If only to cover their bases, environmentalists have from time to time been forthright about the problems of renewable energies. To his credit, John Holdren has punctuated his energy alarmism with a bit of energy realism in this regard. “There is no energy technology presently known or imagined (solar energy not excepted) with negligible environmental impact,” he said in a 1977 essay, “Energy Costs as Potential Limits to Growth” (Dennis Pirages, ed, The Sustainable Society: Implications for Limited Growth, p. 71).…
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ExxonMobil’s new corporate position in favor of carbon taxes, reported today by the Wall Street Journal, is not entirely unexpected. It is the result of a policy drift of recent years toward compromise and appeasement with the company’s political critics.
But I doubt that ExxonMobil has bought into alarmism. Back at Enron, where I was director of public policy analysis, we didn’t necessarily buy into climate alarmism but we welcomed the public’s concern because we had seven profit centers (see pp. 3–4) that stood to benefit. ExxonMobil, the anti-Enron, has not set itself up as a rent-seeker, but it apparently wants a seat at the policy table given the perceived choice between a carbon tax and a carbon cap-and-trade scheme.…
Continue ReadingUniversity of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti and Stanford co-author Rosamond Naylor have an article in this week’s Science magazine that is making headlines across the world.
Why? Because they contend that we are fast heading towards a global food crisis as a result of a future temperature rise projected to accompany increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.
However, the paper itself is long on rhetoric and short on supporting science, with the conclusions based largely on improper reasoning.
They assume that people will sit idly by and slowly perish as the climate changes around them, doggedly clinging to outdated and failing agricultural practices instead of adopting new crop varieties and farming techniques as the climate warrants. This is known as the “dumb farmer scenario.”
But, farmers aren’t dumb. The development and adoption of new technologies and crop varieties is the primary reason why crop yields have increased many fold over the past century.…
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