“Here are the frivolous fifty, with the common denominator to feel guilty about the joys of driving or flying; staying cool or warm; consuming meat, fish, or dairy. And ‘stop saying thank you [in notes and letters]’ and ‘shop vintage.’ And of course, install those solar panels (never mind the UK fog).”

Yesterday’s post examined the human-hate book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthrocene” by Patricia MacCormack (Bloomsbury Academic: 2020). A positive review of that screed introduced me to CambridgeshireLive, a progressive, climate-on-fire news source. There, I encountered CambridgeshireLive’s #Do1thing campaign listing 50 personal actions to address (really?) climate change.

With the failure of country-by-country politics to mitigate if not reverse emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), and consumers naturally choosing the best energies in terms of affordability, convenience, and reliability, it is business-as-usual with fossil fuels’ 85 percent global market share.…

Are there really depletable resources? The answer was “yes” if and only if there was an associated “cessation, once and for all, of technological progress.” This is clearly not the case for natural gas development.  Technological progress is alive and well, and technology is the most powerful non-price determinant of supply.  The “theory of the mine” (Harold Hotelling, 1931), not the mine, has been abandoned. (Enron Corp., The 1995 Enron Outlook. Houston, Texas: 1995, p. 8.)

Part I yesterday described my early effort to sell the idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel to environmental NGOs as part of their climate strategy. Behind this effort was Enron’s case for an expanding resource base for gas.

After severe shortages with natural gas during several winters in the 1970s, partial gas price deregulation resulted in artificially high prices, which quickly led to a supply glut and a price crash.…

“I don’t think there’s any way that we move forward without a frontal confrontation with white supremacy…. We have to address the underlying supremacist logics in our societies and we also need to do what is necessary to be less flammable.” (Naomi Klein, January 5, 2020)

Do Democrats really want to hitch their wagon to the Green New Deal? Support continues to weaken (Arnold Schwarzenegger recently called it bogus, and Trump himself cannot wait to take the Left’s energy program head-on.)

Here are some quotations from Naomi Klein, called “the intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal Movement,” by Alexander Kaufman at HuffPost, titled “Naomi Klein On Looming Eco-Fascism: ‘We Are Literally And Politically Flammable’.”

Here you go!

Climate Alarm!

“We’re in a moment where we are literally flammable.…

” … for the first time in over 40 years, today we are issuing a proposed new rule under the National Environmental Policy Act to completely overhaul the dysfunctional bureaucratic system that has created these massive obstructions. Now, we’re going to have very strong regulation, but it’s going to go very quickly. And if it doesn’t pass, it’s going to not pass quickly.” 

“… our new One Federal Decision policy — it’s called “One Federal Decision” — requires agencies to work closely together to promptly deliver one decision. Yes. The entire process will be completed; the entire federal government approval process will be done.

– President Donald J. Trump, January 9, 2020

The most free-market President in US energy history has added to his winning ways. Last week, he put into play a powerful proposal to depoliticize infrastructure spending under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA).…