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May 6, 2019
Once the GOP Rolls out Climate Policies, It Endorses All the Assumptions of the Left
You can’t beat something with nothing, according to ancient Beltway wisdom, an outlook guaranteed to yield an inexorable increase in the size, cost, and destructiveness of government, even as it forces the opponents of “something” gradually to adopt the assumptions of the proponents, and to descend into a process of negotiating with themselves. The latest…
April 29, 2019
The Paris Agreement and the Costly Pursuit of the Trivial
President Donald Trump on June 1, 2017, announced that the US would exit from the international agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. A final exit cannot take place…
April 10, 2019
Only Approved Climate Change Views Need Apply
Let us behold the “debate” over climate policy now unfolding at the European Union Parliament. Its most prominent feature is a serious effort to deny ExxonMobil (EM) the ability to lobby on climate policy and other related matters with members of the parliament. This effort to redefine debate as non-debate will be voted upon by the parliament at the…
December 17, 2018
Other People’s Money: ESG Investing and the Conflicts of the Consultant Class
Unintended consequences are a longstanding effect of public policies, an eternal truth seemingly invisible to one generation after another of policymakers eager to improve upon the economic arrangements emerging from market competition and individual choices. Witness, for example, a regulation implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2003, intended to reduce the scope of supposed…
November 29, 2018
Observations on Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment
Over the Thanksgiving weekend the Trump administration released Volume 2 of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, eliciting the usual array of apocalyptic predictions from the media about the fate of mankind should we fail to impose sharp limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Herewith, a few observations on this report. The report assumes one particular scenario for…
November 9, 2018
Environmental Policy: Benjamin Zycher Responds to His Critics
I thank Jonathan H. Adler, Patrick Allitt, and William Dennis for their thoughtful and informative commentaries on my Liberty Forum essay on reforming U.S. environmental policy, in particular with respect to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to executive agency statutory interpretations in the face of legal ambiguities. I learned much from their observations, to each…
October 29, 2018
Politicized Law Enforcement and the ExxonMobil White Whale
The latest lawsuit against ExxonMobil (EM), filed by Acting New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood, is straightforward: Got that? Underwood actually is arguing that EM should not concern itself — or its investors — with (1) the aggregate effect of GHG policies on prospective worldwide demand conditions for its energy products, and (2) the…
October 29, 2018
Washington State Initiative 1631: A Carbon Tax and Wealth Redistribution to Favored Interests
The Washington State electorate on November 6 will vote on Initiative 1631, a “pollution” tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the stated goal of which is an annual GHG emissions reduction reaching 25 million tons by 2035 and 50 million tons by 2050. Nowhere in the initiative is there any requirement actually to meet these goals —…
October 22, 2018
Hearken Sinners: The End Is Near
Dog bites man. Baby cries. Water flows downhill. And the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says climate catastrophe is imminent. The new “Summary for Policymakers” of Global Warming of 1.5°Celsius, a “special report” from the IPCC, makes the following central arguments: It is difficult to see how anyone attempting to maintain an objective…
October 4, 2018
Washington Post Climate Reporters Beclown Themselves
They have translated the climate policy equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They have uncovered the smoking gun of smoking guns. They have provided final and convincing proof that the Trump administration — the bête noire of the Paris climate agreement, the facilitators of planetary destruction, the knuckle-dragging deniers of “science,” the heroes of polluters, belching cattle, and…