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March 6, 2018
Climate Lawsuits: What They Say, and What They Fail to Say
For years Congress has refused to impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and now the Trump administration is rolling back the Obama regulations. What are politically-ambitious blue-state politicians to do? The obvious answer: File a lawsuit, claiming that Big Oil has known for decades that increasing GHG concentrations would cause a climate crisis for which it is responsible,…
March 1, 2018
Carbon Taxes and My Friends Aparna Mathur, Adele Morris, and Zilly
Let us now recall the blessed memory of Godzilla, King of the Monsters. I know him as Zilly, as we have grown close over the years and the 30-plus movies that bear his name. Anyway, at the end of that original timeless classic of the silver screen, an “oxygen destroyer” reduced Zilly to a skeleton at the bottom of Tokyo…
February 1, 2018
A Washington State Carbon Tax: All Pain, No Gain
With respect to Washington governor Jay Inslee’s renewed proposal for a “carbon” tax on that state’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, a number to keep closely in mind is: 2/1000 of a degree. That would be the global temperature effect in the year 2100 if Washington were to reduce its GHG emissions to zero immediately. That figure comes from the…
January 12, 2018
The Children’s Climate Lawsuit Against the Children
Litigation may be as American as apple pie, but some lawsuits are so destructive that they stand out even among the hugely expensive wreckage wrought by our legal system. The most prominent current example is the “children’s” climate lawsuit (Juliana v U.S.): A group of kids, including “future generations, through their guardian Dr. James Hansen,”…
October 18, 2017
The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal and the Bureaucratic Pursuit of Power
Never let a crisis go to waste, say the politicos, a stance adapted for its purposes by the permanent regulatory bureaucracy: Never let a corporate scandal go to waste. That is what comes to mind as we behold the investigations and regulatory stances following in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal that emerged in 2015, a…
August 20, 2017
The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal and the Urge for Collective Punishment
A rotten apple spoils the barrel, as the old saying goes, and because of regulatory politics and the incentives of agency officials, the spoilage often proceeds unimpeded even if the rotten one and the others occupy separate barrels. Witness for example the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal that emerged in 2015, a truly brazen act of business…
August 20, 2017
How Jeff Sessions Is Stopping the EPA’s Slush Fund
Principles are to be found in many places, a blessing in the Beltway where principles are needed on a daily basis. One such principle is enshrined in the appropriations clause of the constitution: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” And here is another principle not…
August 7, 2017
The High Cost of Unreliable Power
The climate obsessions of the Obama administration yielded a substantial myopia with respect to the other central goals of energy policy, the cost and reliability of the electric power system in particular. One obvious result of that single-minded focus was a concerted effort to ignore several unavoidable trade-offs, as the push proceeded for expansion of…
August 3, 2017
Wasteful Subsidies for Me and Thee, Not for That Fossil Guy Behind the Tree
Sometimes leftist environmentalists have a point. For instance, they argue that oil subsidies are wasteful and should be abolished. Unfortunately, they typically pollute their sound argument with gross inconsistency and unwarranted alarmism. Oil Change International, a group of mainstream leftist environmental pressure organizations, has published two recent papers complaining that the G20 governments, through international and national development…
June 21, 2017
Other People’s Money: The Immorality Of The Fossil-Fuel Divestment Campaign
California is the center of the political campaign to induce pension funds and others to divest from fossil-fuel investments, justified as a path toward environmental improvement. Unsurprisingly, a new study finds that divestment would lead to losses of up to $3 trillion for Calpers over a 50-year time horizon. The implications for smaller retirement systems also are negative. Since the environmental effects of divestment…