“Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner. (IPCC, below)

… government (coercive) mitigation policy is being left behind by self-interested energy actions around the world. Wind and solar and batteries … are running into limits. A new public policy era post-COP27 is called for. (RLB, below)

The UN Conference of Parties to be held in Cairo, Egypt, next month (COP27) has long been in preparation. Net Zero may be a dead he/she walking (Halloween fright?), but expect no backtracking from the Church of Climate. “Don’t Look Up” … IPCC reports … ExxonKnew … it is a one-after-the-other global media campaign to not focus on the Green Energy Crises or the tripartite fossil-fuel boom but on … Net Zero.…

David Siegel is a man with a message. His Deep Optimism Manifesto spells out a new approach to viewing the world that is at once realistic and optimistic. Written last year, its message is timeless and timely. His opening quotation comes from Julian Simon’s essay in The State of Humanity, p. 642.

I am writing this in response to the Ecomodernism manifesto. It’s a group of smart people doing very important work to help improve the future for humanity and nature.

I think if they looked more into the science of climate change and the economics of abundance, they would arrive at Deep Optimism, a term coined by Matt Ridley, the rational optimist.

People who understand the economics of abundance don’t apply enough critical thinking to understanding climate and the natural world (Hans Rosling, Bjorn Lomborg, Peter Diamandis, Tyler Cowen, Steven Pinker).…

“[The DOE exercise] is egregiously biased due to its reliance on overheated climate models, inflated emission scenarios, and pessimistic adaptation assumptions. Using biased [social cost of carbon] SC-GHG estimates to estimate net benefits is arbitrary and capricious..”

“Reasonable alternative assumptions about climate sensitivity and CO2 fertilization substantially drive down SC-GHG estimates, even pushing social cost values into negative territory.”

The climate road to serfdom is one step at a time on different paths. One path is decarbonization, one step is government policy prohibiting or discouraging homeowners from using gas furnaces of their liking. The simple answer, which Milton Friedman popularized a half-century ago, is: free to choose.

An activist U.S. Department of Energy seeks to regulate/prohibit gas furnaces on a pure physical efficiency standard, demoting up-front cost considerations, as well as back-end reliability issues (such as when the power goes out).…

“… communications between different regulatory agencies as the event approached were inadequate. Transparency regarding the location of natural gas supply infrastructure was atrocious.”

“Currently Texas is #1 in the nation in terms of existing wind capacity. It is also #1 in terms of planned capacity additions for wind and solar, and #2 in the nation for planned battery capacity additions. However, there is little-to-no planned capacity addition for other forms of dispatchable generation. This could become an issue for reliability.” (Baker Institute, study, below)

There is not only government failure in the quest to address market failure. There is analytic failure in identifying market failure that government is empowered to correct. Restated, problems attributed to markets are often the result of prior government intervention on close inspection.

This is true with some classic examples in the energy field, from the origins of public utility regulation of electricity to oil overproduction under the ‘rule of capture’, stories for another day.…