“We’ll be setting up a mitigation program and new funds will be made available above and beyond our existing air quality funding that will mitigate those impacts.” (Liane Randolph, chair. California Air Resources Board, below)
“This huge list shows that if you mess up a grid, you have to try everything to hope to save the situation temporarily. In the proclamation: Air pollution rules–suspended. Ships in harbor—don’t connect to shore power, use your engines. Big industrial users—we’ll pay you $2/kWh not to consume energy. And yet, keeping a nuclear plant operating is not on the list.” (Meredith Angwin, August 2, 2021)
One intervention leads to another and yet another …. The ‘law of increasing intervention,’ as UK energy expert Colin Robinson coined it, is alive and well in the Golden State.…
Continue Reading“Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind. One gallon (3.7 liters) of gasoline (petrol) contains the equivalent of 400 hours of labor by a healthy adult. Fossil fuels raised living standards in much of the world.”
– James Hansen, June 2021
The father of the climate alarm is a straight and accurate shooter on many things, that is outside of climate models and unsettled climate dynamics. His quotation above throws water in the face of Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University, as well as such climate campaigners as Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler.
Hansen’s view is actually mainstream. There is no doubt that dense mineral energies that emerged and took hold by the end of the 19th century unleashed the machines of progress.…
Continue Reading“Although advocacy of aggressive climate-change policies is often draped with the mantle of science, mainstream economists who follow the scientific literature have shown that the popular 1.5°C policy target will pose costs that far exceed the benefits, and that the emission reductions flowing from strict adherence to the 1.5°C target would be worse for the world than doing nothing at all.” (Murphy and McKitrick, below)
Adaptation, not mitigation, has long been the answer of climate economics for climate policy. In fact, at lower climate sensitivity estimates, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are thought to be a positive externality, in the jargon of economics, not a negative requiring government correction.
A new study by Robert P. Murphy and Ross McKitrick, Off Target: The Economics Literature Does Not Support the 1.5C Climate Ceiling, explains this to professional economists and the climate intelligentia alike.…
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