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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 14, 2015
Solving the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority Debt Problem
Puerto Rico and its various government entities owe creditors $72 billion, an enormous debt that Gov. Alejandro García Padilla has described as “unpayable.” Over 11 percent of that total is owed by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), now in negotiations with its creditors to reduce and to stabilize its debts over the long…
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…
August 4, 2015
Crude Oil Exports and the Price of Gasoline
Government policies virtually without exception create economic distortions, so that policy reform can yield results highly counterintuitive. That is the case with the emerging effort to end the current U.S. ban on the export of crude oil, enacted as part of the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The ban was justified as a tool…
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,…
June 17, 2015
Time to End Federal Interference with Free Trade in Crude Oil
The current ban on exports of U.S. crude oil was enacted as part of the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, and was justified on the basis of two fallacies. First: That the 1973 Arab OPEC oil “embargo” was the cause of higher oil prices and the gasoline lines and other market disruptions experienced in…