“DOE’s energy efficiency regulations generally have the effect of increasing the cost of products and reducing competition and innovation.”

“In most other cases, it would be better for DOE to scrap its rules and allow private market actors to develop standards and information tools in their place.”

Julian Morris of the Reason Foundation recently submitted COMMENTS OF REASON FOUNDATION ON THE REGULATORY BURDEN REDUCTION  in a Request for Information (RFI) by the U.S. Department of Energy (Document Number 2017-10866, Docket ID DOE_FRDOC_0001-3375, 82 FR 24582, 5/30/2017.)

Excerpts from his comments follow. (For the full comments, including footnote sources, see here.)

This comment seeks to address questions raised by the Department of Energy in its Request for Information regarding “existing regulations, paperwork requirements and other regulatory obligations that can be modified or repealed, consistent with law, to achieve meaningful burden reduction while continuing to achieve the Department’s statutory obligations.”…

– by Istvan Marko, J. Scott Armstrong, William M. Briggs, Kesten Green, Hermann Harde, David R. Legates, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, and Willie Soon

MIT president’s letter repeats standard climate alarm claims. Here are the facts (also see Part II tomorrow).

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“Fortunately, contrary to Professor Reif’s claims, the actual current scientific understanding of Earth’s climate dispels the popular delusion that any manmade global warming will be dangerous. That means adhering to the Paris agreement would be ‘a bad deal for America,’ and not only on economic and equity grounds, as President Trump stated.”

“In the last 20 years, humans have released over a third of all the CO₂ produced since the beginning of the industrial period. Yet global mean surface temperature has remained essentially constant for at least 15 years – a fact that has been acknowledged by the IPCC, whose models failed to predict it.”

“Professor Dolan is invited to study the Hayek literature to see if any of the above nine points are not valid. The burden of proof is on him to try to square a classical liberal with disputed externality pricing, ‘tax-bads’ public finance, international tariffs, equity tax-dividend adjustments, and government planning.”

Yale economics PhD Ed Dolan recently attempted to link the classical liberal scholar F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) to a carbon tax in a piece published by the (misnamed) Niskanen Center. [1]

“Friedrich Hayek on Carbon Taxes” is more than unconvincing. It is shoddy. It fails to make its point and (purposefully?) neglects the obvious themes of Hayekian economics and political economy for a generic issue such as climate change.

Professor Dolan begins by admitting that Hayek never wrote anything on the subject.…

“I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions.”

– Professor Teresa Lloro-Bidart (below)

“Trump and the climate-destroyers he brought into office with him, such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt, are not driven by compassion for victims. They are animated by a callous and rapacious search for profits for themselves and their cronies. If they cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn’t want to ban Syrian refugees like the Kurds from the United States. Nor would they want to spew ever more tons of the most noxious gas of all into the blue skies of the only planetary home the human race has.”