Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute recently posted on the spat between environmental purist Joe Romm of Climate Progress and the environmental groups NRDC, EDF, and WRI in regard to a brokered cap-and-trade proposal with certain firms within the energy industry.

Taylor was actually nice to Mr. Romm, an intellectual foe who, after their online debate, said in a blog post at Grist that the Cato Institute was intellectually bankrupt. Stated Romm in his post "Greedwashing":…

When I passed around my critique of William Nordhaus’s case for a carbon tax, a typical complaint was that I wasn’t a climate scientist, and so I had no business saying that some of the IPCC projections were possibly biased towards the alarmist side.  Of course no one likes to be criticized, but I understood that it was a perfectly fair objection to raise.  As an economist, I really wasn’t qualified to cast aspersions on the models of Jim Hansen and such.

So it is with great amusement that I watch the extreme global-warming crowd react to minor expressions of doubt coming from their previous allies in the context of a “green recovery.”  Many economists who are completely sold on manmade climate change–and even think that it is important for the federal government to take quick action to curb the problem–are merely pointing out that the Obama Administration efforts to link this issue with the recession may be inefficient. …

Investment in energy-efficient light bulbs would, in 5 years, save more than 5 times as much energy as an equal investment in a wind turbine would produce in 20 years.

This fact is clearly demonstrated with simple arithmetic!…

“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”

Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.

And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever.…