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February 4, 2016
Shut Up, She Explained: My Request for Climate Evidence
Policy research in the Beltway offers numerous attractions, among them the opportunity to exchange views and engage in back-and-forth challenges with other experts, in settings both formal and informal. Such activities are more than merely fun: Intellectual atrophy is the inexorable result of living in an echo chamber, an effect that can be avoided through…
January 19, 2016
Subsidizing the Rich Through California’s Solar Scheme
Residential consumers of electricity in California pay almost 17 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), a price higher than those of every other state in the lower 48, except New York and five of the New England states. The average for the nation as a whole is about 12.7 cents per kWh. Neighboring states in the Pacific…
December 18, 2015
An Agreement to Prop up the Climate Industry
The question before us is straightforward: Is the Paris climate agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions a good strategy? A strategy, of course, is a set of tools used to achieve some goal. It is not the goal itself. Accordingly, we must ask: What is the goal? Twenty20 License If it is some unspecified reduction…
December 15, 2015
Saving the Planet: How Climate Breakthroughs Are Made
Breaking news Saturday in Paris from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: National leaders described the agreement finally reached as “an historic breakthrough”. Twenty20 License Oops. My mistake. That was from the 13th COP in Bali in 2007. Then there was the 15th COP in Copenhagen in…
November 30, 2015
Paris In the Fall: COP-21 Vs Climate Evidence
I. Introduction The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21), the latest installment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, begins today in Paris amid a feverish effort to achieve “binding” commitments by no fewer than 142 nations to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. The attendees — the crème de la crème of the international climate industry — will tell themselves and the…
November 6, 2015
On Chinese Coal, the UN Vs. The New York Times
Good things come to those who wait, and the waiting is minimal when it comes to the endless stream of entertaining silliness offered by the U.N. climate-change bureaucracy. On November 3, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, informed us that “China has taken an undisputed leadership” in terms…
September 29, 2015
The Strange Silence About Climate Policy and the Looming Apocalypse
I kid, of course: Silence is the last adjective one would use about climate policy, except with respect to such minor parameters as the actual benefits of various policy prescriptions and the actual evidence of climate impacts, about which more below. Cacophony is more accurate, particularly with the 21st (!) Conference of the Parties looming…
August 5, 2015
President Obama’s Clean Power Plan: All Cost, No Benefit
On Monday President Obama announced the final “clean power plan” regulation for greenhouse gas emissions from electric generating plants, the centerpiece of the broader Climate Action Plan being implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency. Amid the many assertions about the looming climate crisis confronting “the planet,” about which more below, one central parameter was conspicuous by its absence. To wit: What…
July 16, 2015
The Inconvenient Truth About Climate Policy
Climate change is a manmade crisis, and so the need to implement sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is paramount. That summarizes the constant drumbeat of conventional wisdom, which raises an interesting question: If the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan – a 17 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – were to be implemented immediately, what temperature reduction…
July 7, 2015
Pope Francis, Environmentalists, and Economists on Human Stewardship of the Earth
The many dominant media reports on Pope Francis’ new papal encyclical letter, “Laudato Si’” (“On Care for Our Common Home”), make it clear that the encyclical represents an endorsement of the conventional (or mainstream environmental) view of anthropogenic climate change, with explicit papal support for “enforceable international agreements” (¶173) to deal with the purported attendant adverse future effects. And,…