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June 2, 2017
Leaving Paris: One and a Half Cheers for President Trump
Mr. Trump yesterday announced that he would withdraw the U.S. from the international climate agreement reached in Paris in late 2015, but would seek to renegotiate it so as to achieve a “better deal.” And his disparagement of the “Green Climate Fund” — a planned $100 billion wealth transfer from the developed economies to the developing…
May 30, 2017
ExxonMobil Endorses the Paris Climate Agreement
There is a time to weep and a time to laugh. And the recent letter from ExxonMobil urging President Trump not to exit the Paris climate agreement provides a time for both, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. Let us review the letter in detail, subjecting its assertions to the most basic principles of policy analysis. Related reading: The…
May 25, 2017
Jim Pethokoukis and the Incremental Value of Climate Policy Zero
My colleague Jim Pethokoukis deserves applause for his recent argument that the effects of increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations are uncertain, notwithstanding the loud assertions of many, and that incremental policy interventions are vastly to be preferred to “abrupt and expensive changes in public policy.” Incrementalism in this context reasonably can be interpreted (or defined) as adaptation over time…
May 25, 2017
The Absurdity That Is the Paris Climate Agreement
Let us put aside initially any dispute about the science and evidence underlying the Paris COP-21 agreement to limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Let us ask instead what the agreement ostensibly would achieve and what it would cost. If we apply the EPA climate model under a set of assumptions that strongly exaggerate the effectiveness of international emissions reductions, the…
May 18, 2017
Exxon Lied, People Died — or Something
Thee heat is on, not because summer beckons, but instead because of a pressure campaign now being aimed at the new California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra. An alliance of environmentalists, plaintiff attorneys, public-sector spending interests, public officials, and others is attempting to induce him to investigate the fossil-fuel industry in general and Exxon in particular. The argument is…
April 21, 2017
Earth Day and the Divestment Campaign Against Humanity
Is it confusion? Or is it malevolence? “It” is the driving force underlying the loud clamor for divestment from fossil fuel assets, a political pressure campaign that is growing in sound and fury—and international jet-setting—even as actual government actions to reduce the production and use of fossil fuels are proving futile. @vinnikava via Twenty20 The answer: It is both, so that divestment will be a central theme of…
April 11, 2017
Sticky Tar of Climate Politics Oozes over Oil Reserve Valuations
Environmentalist ideology and political ambition in combination make for a dangerous blend, and nowhere is that truth clearer than in the context of climate politics, the valuation of fossil-fuel reserves and accusations of “fraud.” With the deregulatory decisions of the Trump administration, in particular in the context of a severe prospective reduction in federal efforts…
February 9, 2017
The Achilles’ Heel of the Obama Climate Regulations
An existing executive order can be reversed with a new one — a stroke of the pen — but regulations promulgated through the formal public notice and comment processes of administrative law can be undone only with newer regulations adopted through that same mechanism. Moreover, efforts to reform or to reverse a regulatory apparatus as…
January 27, 2017
The Environmental Left and Keystone XL
Everything old is new again, the latest manifestation of which is the reaction of the environmental Left to the news that President Donald Trump has issued presidential memoranda and an executive order resurrecting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and beginning the process of reversing the abject obstructionism of the Obama administration toward infrastructure investment for the production and transport…
December 14, 2016
Trump Nominee Scott Pruitt Will Clean up the EPA
Life in the Beltway offers a range of amusements, the latest of which is the reaction of the environmental left to President-elect Donald Trump’s announced intention to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Climate denier! An enemy of the EPA! An arsonist in charge of fighting…