“Mr. Pickens’s original vision had something for everyone. First he would build a wind farm in Texas with 2,700 turbines costing upward of $10 billion. That would pump power into the national grid, allowing huge amounts of natural gas to be diverted from power plants to newly equipped cars and trucks. The result, he promised, would be a sharp reduction in the country’s dependence on Middle East crude.”

“‘This to me is like a war without guns,’ says Mr. Pickens….” 

– Neil King, Pickens’s Windmills Tilt Against Market Realities, Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2009.

A decade ago, a rent-seeking, vainglorious Texas oil man named T. Boone Pickens spent tens of millions of dollars to promote what today might be called the Little Green Deal. It was nicely summarized in the Wall Street Journal at the time by Neil King, Pickens’s Windmills Tilt Against Market Realities.…

“The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States … have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.”

– Milton Friedman. “Which Way for Capitalism?” Reason, May 1977, p. 21.

“To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.”

– Carl Pope (Sierra Club). Quoted in Dean Calbreath, “Pickens Pitches Plans to Shift U.S. Away From Oil,” San Diego Union Tribune, June 25, 2008.

They are not against capitalism. They can be very charismatic, in the know, and mainstream. They may be industry leaders. They are always politically correct and receive good press. And they can, often do, pledge allegiance in the abstract to the American way of free enterprise.…

“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich (1971) [1]

Doom and gloom—repeatedly falsified—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s start-to-finish science advisor. Back at Harvard University, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy has been been quiet. He avoided making specific, apocalyptic predictions during his Obama years (January 2009– January 2017) and has rarely made the news since. But his many written and spoken statements beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest man in Boston/Cape Cod on this day.

Read—but don’t be frightened.…

“In its rush to regulate greenhouse gases in 2009, the Obama Administration missed an important step. It utterly failed to submit the greenhouse gas endangerment finding to the Science Advisory Board for peer review, as required by statute, and that violation is fatal to the endangerment finding.”

– Robert Henneke, director, Center for the American Future. Texas Public Policy Foundation Press Release. May 2, 2017

It is time to play offense. Legal issues aside, numerous lines of evidence have come together to strengthen the intellectual case that the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a net planetary benefit, or a positive externality in the jargon of economics.

This week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) filed a petition with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency challenging the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding designating man-made greenhouse gas emissions as a danger to human health.…