Carlin Economics and Science

With emphasis on climate change

Selecting Biden-Harris Could Be Disastrous for the US

Perhaps he [Biden] knows that his new progressive allies would be happy for him to win them a presidency but even happier for him to then disappear as soon as possible.—Victor Davis Hanson, September 6, 2020, New York Post Previous readers of this blog will long since have understood my view that there are very

Read More »

Photosynthesis Does NOT Threaten Earth

Guest post by Just Beau This post will: Salute free speech Place climate alarm in fair context, international socialism Explain alarm is not respectful of photosynthesis, nor honest science Reflect on disinformation Because climate alarm is born of politics, it is apt to begin with a campaign update. Campaign 2020: During TV coverage prior to

Read More »

Herds of Deranged Globalists

Guest Post by Just Beau Photosynthesis enables life on Earth:   The Field Museum, situated in Chicago, provides a superb exhibit about the evolution of life on Earth, encompassing the past 4.6 billion years.   It includes stunning fossils of long extinct fish and dinosaurs.   Plants get fuller billing at a second exhibit, “Plants of the World.”  It

Read More »

Real Opinion: Portents of a Happy New Year

Guest Post by Just Beau Individuals range along a spectrum about climate alarmism.   From left to right, there are true believers, supporters, leaners, people unsure, those who lean skeptical, and lastly adamant skeptics.   I am in this final category.  I seldom reject anything with the rest-easy conviction that I enjoy about climate alarmism. This post

Read More »

Braying Donkeys of Climate Alarm; Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

Guest Post by Just Beau The future of climate alarmism as a political movement is problematic.  Even once warm fads grow tired in time, their allure cooling.  The goal of replacing industrial emissions of C02 via reliance on solar and wind technologies is implausible.  After three decades, alarmism seems ever harder to sell, outside the

Read More »

The Real News about Climate: CO2 Is No Threat

Guest Post by Just Beau Climate alarmism does not exemplify the honest pursuit of science.  Pseudo-scientific evidence or arguments, undisclosed or falsified data, are lodged within an enveloping political narrative and best understood in this fuller context.  The surest way to understand climate alarmism is as self-interested politics.    Many have been taught climate alarmism in

Read More »

No New Post This Weekend

It has not proved possible to write a new post this week.  Please take the opportunity to read some of my previous posts that you may have missed.

Read More »

The Science Is Quite Clear: Reducing CO2 Emissions Only Raises Energy Prices

Climate science is not well developed but is quite clear on some matters despite the continued attempts by climate alarmists to obfuscate it. There is currently nothing to worry about climate except the slow descent into the next ice age after some time geologically speaking. Humans have multiplied and developed rapidly during the current warm

Read More »

Climate Alarmism Is Now a Real Economic Threat to the US

Climate alarmism is probably the most insidious, largest, and most dangerous scam ever perpetrated on the American public and most of the developed world. Unless brought down by reality, it is now reaching such dimensions that it could even end the position of the current developed countries as the primary engine for economic and technological

Read More »

Unilateral US Decarbonization Could Have Serious Economic Consequences

The current unilateral US decarbonization proposals by various Democrats promoting the Green New Deal (GND) climate schemes suffer from two particularly crucial assumptions that they have made. One is the extremely doubtful assumption that CO2 levels determine temperatures as opposed to temperatures determining CO2 levels. The assumption being made is that it is the atmospheric

Read More »

Net Zero Emissions Will Never Be “Achieved;” Reduced Global CO2 Emissions Will Be Hard Enough

The basic position of the climate “environmentalists” (CEs) on energy has long been that CO2 emissions should be drastically reduced (which, they claim, would reduce global temperatures). They are trying to achieve this while being anti-nuclear, anti-fracking, and anti-fossil fuels. They instead favor “renewables” except hydro power. They favor government intervention to achieve these energy

Read More »

The Significance of Biden’s Climate Proposal

There is now little doubt that climate will be a major issue in the 2020 Presidential election. Now that former Vice President Biden has put forth an aggressive, left-wing program to waste enormous resources on trying to reduce US carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, it is hard to see how the US can avoid a contentious

Read More »

Why Socialism Is a Bad Alternative to Capitalism for Natural Resource Development and Environmental Protection

As discussed last week, the Climate Socialists in the US Democratic Party ultimate objective appears to be to replace capitalism by socialism. It is clear, however, that Socialism has a dismal record both in leading to environmental problems and in inadequate development and use of sensitive but highly productive new techniques. The environmental records of

Read More »

The Left’s Real Purpose in Advocating Climate Socialism

In case anyone had any doubts as to what the climate movement is trying to do, the climate socialists have now told us. The aim is to transform the US from a capitalist economy into a socialistic one. In recent months various Far Left Democrats have produced blueprints as to what this would look like,

Read More »

Two Developments that Could Prove Significant

Two climate developments this week could prove to be significant. First, USEPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler implied that there might be a larger review of climate science. Second, Sanjeev Sabhlok published an opinion piece in the Times of India arguing that climate science was not really a science as yet and should not be used to

Read More »

The Weird Reality of World Climate Policy

Climate policies vary greatly by country. For convenience I will characterize a move towards greater government-imposed “decarbonization” as a move to the left; and I will call less such decarbonization or fewer climate government regulations or fewer market-distorting subsidies to be a move towards the right. Since the current optimal climate policy is to take

Read More »

A Devastating Review of the Green New Deal

This week the American Enterprise Institute issued a devastating critique by Benjamin Zyndar of the Grean New Deal (GND) proposal introduced by Senator Markey in the Senate and Representative Ocasio-Cortez in the House of Representatives. It was subsequently rejected by the Senate in a 57 to 0 vote. A one-page summary of this critique can

Read More »

The Underlying Reasons Why the “New Energy Economy” Is Nonsense

According to Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute: “A movement has been growing for decades to replace hydrocarbons, which collectively supply 84% of the world’s energy. It began with the fear that we were running out of oil. That fear has since migrated to the belief that, because of climate change and other environmental concerns,

Read More »

The Extreme Politicization of the News Media May Have Started on Climate, but Is Now Spreading to Larger Political Subjects in the US

In recent decades it has become increasingly evident that the mainstream/liberal press has become more and more sympathetic towards the so-called “consensus” viewpoint on climate change. They have become less and less sympathetic to skeptic viewpoints and now hardly mentioned them. I became very conscious of the huge changes in American journalism in recent decades

Read More »

The “Green New Dealers” Have Lost All Perspective

Perhaps the worst aspect of the “Green New Deal” (GND) recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey is that the authors have lost (or possibly never had) all perspective on climate change. They are acting as if climate change were as bad a problem as the Great Depression, and that another “New

Read More »

PCCS Would Be a Good Start, but Much More Needed

The Climate-Industrial Complex (CIC) has taken umbrage over the Trump Administration’s proposal for a Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS) within the National Security Council (NSC). It is to be headed by a distinguished physicist, Dr. William Happer, to examine the effects of climate change on national security. The proposed Commission would examine the causes

Read More »

When Socialism Fails

One of the underlying problems illustrated by the climate change scam is that government usually cannot make economic decisions as well as the free market. In some cases the free market selects inefficient economic decisions, particularly in cases where actual pollution is involved. But much more often the worst decisions are made by government interference

Read More »

Why the “Green New Deal” Should Be Abandoned

It is ever more certain that climate change is going to be a major issue in the 2020 Presidential election. Many of the declared candidates have already endorsed Congressional resolutions called the “Green New Deal” (GND) introduced by a freshman Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Senator Edward Markey, D-MA. The program has been costed

Read More »

When Will the Trump Administration Finally Confront the CIC?

I have advocated independent review of climate science by the Trump Administration over the last few years, most recently here. The best way to do this is a formal reevaluation and rejection of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding (EF) issued by the Obama US Environmental Protection Agency in 2009. This might lead to real action–rejection

Read More »

Why the Green New Deal Uses a Particularly Expensive Approach to Not Achieving Its Environmental Objectives

The Democratic Party continues to rush ever further into the climate swamp. The left wing of the party accepts climate junk science and now wants to implement rapid decarbonization as national policy through a so-called “Green New Deal” (GND). See also here. They have added many non-climate aspects including providing economic security “to all who

Read More »

The Basic Reason Carbon Taxes Are a Bad Idea

Carbon tax proposals seem to be showing up more frequently of late. Now if we had strong evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was the cause of alleged global warming and that warming is undesirable and must be prevented from increasing, maybe such a tax would be worth consideration. But this is hardly the case. It

Read More »

The Unofficial Abandonment of the Scientific Method by Climate Alarmists and Democratic Socialists

The far left of the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly enamored of socialism. Examples include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other self-described democratic socialists. What has been missed is that they appear to be increasingly enamored of policies that in actuality involve junking the scientific method too. Their current favorite agendas, such as the Green

Read More »

There Will Be No New Post This Week

Due to last minute changes in my planned post for this week, there will not be any new post this week. Please check back next week for a new post. In the meantime you might want to read some of the older posts you may have missed.

Read More »

The Staggering Costs of Decreasing CO2 Emissions

Climate extremists, like other hucksters, usually emphasize how their favored policies (decarbonization in this case) will avoid various alleged disasters, which never seem to happen except in the distant future. Rarely do they explain what these efforts will cost. Rather, the true believers always claim that the costs are small, even though they actually are

Read More »

The UN Loss and Damage Scam Made Major Progess at Katowice without US Opposition

Almost unreported during the just concluded UN Katowice COP 24 conference is the biggest scam of all in the climate scam supported by the United Nations, the Democratic Party, and the other members of the Climate-Industrial Complex. The Paris “Treaty” of 2015 included a “Loss and Damage” provision under which developed countries would be obligated

Read More »

The Yellow Jackets Are Right About Green Policies

Today the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed Piece on the rebellion by the French “Yellow Jackets” against the French Government plans to greatly increase taxes on fossil fuels. The author cites many of the reasons cited by climate skeptics for doubting the “science” claimed by climate alarmists for such carbon taxes. The article is

Read More »

The Chinese “Leadership” in Renewables Is Crumbling

Much ink has been spilled painting China as the leader of the UN climate alarmist nations. They are painted as abandoning fossil fuels and building “renewable” energy sources such as wind and solar. They have built some, but Patricia Adams argues in a new report that the primary emphasis in recent years has shifted to

Read More »

A Possible Significant Turning Point in the Climate Scam

Something unique in the extensive history of the global warming/climate change scam occurred this week. The intended working class victims of the “green” climate campaign have rebelled in recent weeks and this week they achieved a major concession by the French Government. The Government has agreed to postpone a scheduled increase in the carbon tax

Read More »

How the Trump Administration Flubbed the New National Climate Assessment

Last Friday the Trump Administration published the latest in a series of reports mandated by Congress called the National Climate Assessment. Like most anything concerning climate change, the report was primarily political in intent. The report emphasized all the allegedly adverse effects that climate change would supposedly result in and did not examine whether the

Read More »

The Increasing Extremism of the Climate Alarmists

The climate warmists have become ever more extremist, just like the Democratic Party. They have have now left all bounds of rationality. It is now widely accepted that it is perfectly acceptable to carry out government-enforced efforts that are supposed to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere despite the great value of more of CO2.

Read More »

Did the Climate Scam Gain or Lose in the Mid-terms?

The most significant results of the Mid-term elections on the climate issue were at the state level, not the national level. And these changes were not very significant. The trends are similar to what has been happening since the 2016 election. Changes at the national level have been mainly based on the power of the

Read More »

No New Blog Post This Week

Due to an unexpected change in the planned blog post for this week, I regret that there will be no new post until next week. Do come back late next week for a new post or read an earlier post that you have missed.

Read More »

The IPCC’s Attempt to Move the Goalposts for Climate Change

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a new report concerning the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, the goal of the Paris “Treaty.” In doing so, they changed the basic definition of how to measure climate by mixing existing and non-existing temperature data. This surely constitutes

Read More »

Environmental Idealism in Handling Plastic Waste Ignores Economics and Leads to Growing Ocean Pollution

Recycling of post-consumer plastic waste leads to problems despite the seeming virtuous goal of “recycling” so that plastic is never disposed of in landfills or incinerated. A recent report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London explains how seeming virtuousness without attention to economics leads to disaster. Idealistic environmentalists want to create a

Read More »

Richard Lindzen Verbally Demolishes the Climate Change Scam

On October 8, Dr. Richard Lindzen, a retired Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of if not the most distinguished academic meteorologists alive today, gave a brilliant speech on climate change sponsored by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London. The full speech can be found here. James Delingpole’s summary

Read More »

How the Supreme Court Could Now End the Climate Wars

Many climate skeptics were hopeful that the election of Donald Trump would end the climate wars in the US on favorable terms. Many of us assumed that this would be done by persuading EPA to overturn the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding (EF). But so far all that has happened is that a number of Obama

Read More »

The Madness Intensifies

This week in climate has been somewhat crazier than most. Based on Florence, the usual suspects are claiming that hurricanes are becoming more intense, even though they are not. California has decided to go full “decarbonization.” Governor Brown invited all his climate friends to San Francisco to share their “insights” with each other. And Al

Read More »

Implications of Trump’s Choice of Science Adviser

For over a year outsiders seemed to expect that Professor William Happer, a physicist from Princeton, would be the Trump Administration’s Science Adviser. He had previously served as a (lower case) science adviser in the George H. W. Bush and Clinton Administrations, and could not be accused of being sympathetic to the Obama Administration on

Read More »

Implications of EPA’s Proposed ACE Replacement for the CPP

This week EPA announced their proposed Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) replacement regulation for the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). The Obama Administration’s CPP regulation was intended to achieve much of the CO2 emissions reductions the US proposed under the Paris climate accord. The new ACE regulation is a substantially reduced version of the CPP,

Read More »

Why the Climate Alarmists Are Winning at the State Level

I recently attended a public hearing sponsored by my state government on a state “energy plan” they are preparing. Now we all know that such plans often are used by governments to unjustifiably interfere in the choice of energy sources. I was a little surprised that 70-80 people showed up since the state had already

Read More »

How Well Is EPA Actually Doing on Deregulation?

There is little doubt that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency is trying to roll back a number of Obama’s environmental regulations. And there is also little doubt that many deserve to be partially or fully withdrawn because they are not improving the environment or have so few economic benefits that they do not justify the

Read More »

Time to Drain the Energy Swamp

By Viv Forbes Reproduced from: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/drain-the-swamp.pdf The Australian electricity market has become a stinking swamp covered with a tangled net of treaties, laws, rules, obligations, prohibitions, targets, taxes and subsidies. The swamp conceals the rubble of demolished coal generators; another plant destined for destruction (Liddell) is gradually sinking in the green ooze. The swamp is

Read More »

Net Metering–Another “Renewable” Subsidy that Needs to Be Eliminated

In an efficient electrical generation system each source of electric power would compete against all other sources in terms of cost and reliability, and the result would be that only the most efficient sources would actually supply electricity. This would result in lower power costs and increased reliability of the system compared to the present

Read More »

Why Climate Alarmists Are Not Really Interested in Humans or the Environment

Despite what you may have read from the Climate-Industrial Complex (CIC), especially their sympathizers in the mainstream press, burning fossil fuels helps everyone except the non-competitive renewable energy industry climate alarmists promote. Increases in carbon dioxide (CO2) have no significant effect on temperatures in the real world or on the frequency of extreme weather events.

Read More »

The Trump Administration’s Likely Unwillingness to End the Climate Scam

It has become evident that the Pruitt EPA did not want to challenge the scientific climate “consensus,” either because they did not think that they could win the ensuing battle or because they wanted to avoid angering voters who accept the scientific “consensus” on climate. As pointed out repeatedly in my climate book and this

Read More »

The Climate-Industrial Complex Finally Gets Their Man

After an unprecedented, even for Washington, attempt to smear Scott Pruitt for the purpose of forcing President Trump to ask for his resignation, the Climate-Industrial Complex (CIC) finally got President Trump today to accept the resignation of Pruitt, his Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The resources devoted to this effort by the CIC

Read More »

How the Obama Administration Undermined Federal Benefit-Cost Analysis to Justify Its Climate-related Regulations

The Reagan Administration made a serious effort to require that benefit-cost analysis be used to determine whether all new major regulations were economically efficient. Such analyses had long been used for judging the efficiency of Federal water projects, but this was the first time that they were required for analyzing Federal regulations. The purpose was

Read More »

What Will Be the Outcome of the Great Climate Scam?

An interesting question is what will be the outcome of the great climate scam? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 it is clear that all coal fossil fuel power plants would have been shut down and even some of the natural gas plants. By that time it would have become evident that all that

Read More »

Two More Major Actions Are Needed before We Can Celebrate Victory over the CIC

A number of skeptic observers have recently marked the one year anniversary of President Trump’s decision to leave the Paris accord (for which the Senate never approved US participation) with favorable comments concerning how it was the right decision and how much progress has been made in the last year in decreasing the Climate-Industrial Complex‘s

Read More »

The Short and Simple on Why Climate Alarmism Is Nonsense

One of the main arguments made by Al Gore for climate alarmism has been his claim that global temperatures will increase catastrophically with increases in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). He used a hokey correlation analysis to try to prove his case. There is indeed a relationship between temperatures and CO2 since CO2 levels

Read More »

Why Proposed Wind and Solar Power Projects Should Be Rejected Nationwide

While USEPA is trying to reduce the number of regulations it has, the climate industrial complex (CIC) is busy making use of Federal and other subsidies to promote their inefficient, unreliable, and expensive “renewable” sources of electric power. America, however, is more and more dependent on reliable and inexpensive electric power for almost everything it

Read More »

Both Sides Ignore the Major Finding of Recent Climate Research

The major development in climate science in the last year or two is something almost no one talks about–strong evidence that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have no significant effect on global temperatures in the real world over recent decades. The studies involved conclude that the minor increases in global temperatures during this period

Read More »

“Environmental” Orthodoxy Can Be Deadly for Humans and Ecosystems

As discussed in my book on climate, one of the many problems with the CIC’s climate “consensus” is that it ends up delaying if not destroying the hopes of billions of people in less developed countries (LDCs) to reduce their exposure to indoor air pollution (IAP) and reduce their endless efforts to scavenge for wood

Read More »

President Trump Strongly Supports Pruitt Over CIC Allegations

President Trump sent the following Twitter message on April 7 with regard to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s performance: While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at EPA. Record clean Air & Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market

Read More »

Why Climate Alarmism Will Probably Have to Really Hurt People before They Are Likely to Abandon This Nonsense

Climate alarmists claim to have all the answers even to highly technical questions concerning the electrical grid despite the fact that their predictions of catastrophic global warming have never happened and there is every reason to believe they never will. Their “answers” to avert this scare disaster are monumentally expensive and useless. One of the

Read More »

Why CHECC Believes It is Essential to Repeal the EF, Not Replace the CPP

My February 16 post explains why it is crucial for the US Environmental Protection Agency to repeal but not replace the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and instead reconsider and repeal the EPA GHG Endangerment Finding (EF) as part of its proposal to repeal the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. On February 26 the Concerned Household

Read More »

The Enormous Costs of Remaking the US Electric Power System

The climate alarmists are not only trying to argue that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and human-caused emissions should be controlled and reduced rather than the miracle molecule that makes life on Earth possible. They are also trying to get others to pay the extremely high costs of rebuilding and replacing the non-“renewable” plus hydro

Read More »

How the Climate Alarmists Managed to Get Everything Wrong

Several decades ago the “environmentalists” decided to push the alleged threat of global warming (before hedging it by renaming it climate change). This would appear to be opportunistic to say the least. When global warming was occurring, they used that as the threat to get public and governmental attention and campaign to “prevent” it from

Read More »

Rebuttals to Ten Typical False Claims by Climate Alarmists

Climate alarmists are constantly trying to justify their misguided goal of decreasing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the basic molecules that makes possible life on Earth, by making various claims as to the alleged adverse effects of increasing emissions of CO2. To date these claims have either been shown to be false or

Read More »

The Irrationality of the Democratic Party with Respect to Environmentalism

According to an internet report two of the nation’s leading pollsters released polling results with strategies to elevate conservation issues in the 2018 midterms while conceding policies like climate change and public lands were low priorities for voters in the 2016 presidential election. This is what they concluded: Both pollsters admitted that issues broadly defined

Read More »

Climate Alarmism Is Based on GCMs and Thus on Nothing

There are many problems with the General Circulation Models (GCMs) used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and climate alarmists as the basis for their doctrine that CO2 is a pollutant and that increases in CO2 emissions will result in catastrophic increases in atmospheric temperatures (the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming or CAGW

Read More »

Why Climate Alarmism Is Mad

Climate change will occur whether humans try to influence it or not. None of the current alarmist proposals to affect climate change will have any measurable effect on temperatures. Greater efforts by the US or other developed nations to lower CO2 emissions will not result in lower world emissions relative to current levels since less

Read More »

The Radical “Environmentalists” Are Too Often the Problem, Not the Answer

Modern “environmentalists” are increasingly not the answer to environmental problems; they are too often the primary problem. They are attempting to remake society, government, and the economy to solve what they claim are environmental problems. Their “cures” are often much worse than the problems, which are increasingly more minor or even non-problems. Some of the

Read More »

What’s at Stake in US Adoption of Climate Alarmist Policies

It is all too easy to forget what is at stake in the attempts by the Obama Administration and climate alarmists to implement climate alarmist policies in the US. One of the primary issues is whether the US would be wise to greatly increase the cost of energy used in the US by making it

Read More »

None of the Climate Alarmist Apocalypses Have Occurred or Are Even Possible

The climate alarmists have long tried to sell their apocalyptic scam by claiming that their policies will avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures. The Daily Caller has recently inventoried some of the widely publicized such climate apocalypses predicted over the last 30 years by examining 12 of them. The alarmists’ 12 apocalyptic predictions have proved

Read More »

Added Information on APS Red/Blue Workshop

Cfact today published a short blog post that provides added background concerning the red/blue team workshop sponsored by the American Physical Society in 2014. Those who wish to learn more about the workshop may find it useful to read the Cfact post before plunging into the 573 page APS transcript. See also my related previous

Read More »

Red Team/Blue Team Review to Start Soon

Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, stated at a conference sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundations on November 30 in Washington that he had talked to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last week. Pruitt, he said, told him that the red team/blue team review that Pruitt has been proposing to debate climate science for several

Read More »

New Essay by Rupert Darwall Highlights a Previous Assessment of Climate Science

The Competitive Enterprise Institute yesterday made available an essay by Rupert Darwall that explores the expressions of public certainty and private uncertainty by climate scientists at a small workshop organized by the American Physical Society (APS) in 2014. The essay extensively references the workshop transcript, which can be downloaded from the APS. Scott Pruitt, the

Read More »

Europe’s Increasing Opposition to Climate Alarmism May Prove to Be Important

Perhaps the most significant recent development in climate alarmism is the increasing internal polarization of two major European countries. In recent years Western Europe has been the primary home of climate alarmism. The negotiations to form a new German government have broken down on several issues, of which climate may be the most important. This

Read More »
Scroll to Top