The environmental left is in some disarray following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  After all, BP had trumpeted for years the idea that it was ‘Beyond Petroleum.’  Shell and ChevronTexaco had mounted similar campaigns.  All had collected numerous awards for their commitment to sustainability and other objectives of the green lobby.  Yet here was BP responsible for worst environmental disaster many people had seen.  The hand-wringing is palpable among the Corporate Social Responsibility mavens.  Here’s the conclusion of one group,…

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One of the central insights of Free-Market Environmentalism is that people treat the environment as a luxury good.  They are willing to pay for it when they have spare money, but not when they don’t.  That’s why treating the environment as a tax, which is how statist environmentalism works, arouses resentment, while treating it as a privately-owned asset, like FME does, promotes stewardship and conservation.

There’s more evidence for this view from a new study, Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle:…

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Senator Kerry just said during the debate on SJRes 26, the “Murkowski resolution” to disapprove EPA’s rule relating to greenhouse gas regulation that the USA pays President Ahmadinejad of Iran $100m a day for oil.

This is absolutely, unequivocally false.  Iran is subject to sanctions that specifically target the Iranian oil industry.  This is from the Energy Information Administration’s website:

As per the Iran Transactions Regulations, administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), U.S. persons may not…

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The Climategate scandal showed how several of the world’s top climate scientists were hell bent on keeping “skeptical” views out of the scientific literature and in particular, the IPCC reports.  If you wanted an illustration of how this actually worked in practice, then economist Ross McKitrick has a doozy for you.

Ross realized that one of the IPCC’s central claims, one that could be regarded as foundational, was fabricated and provably false.  He wrote a paper demonstrating this and proceeded to…

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As threatened, the new CAFE standards have arrived, with the EPA muscling in on territory reserved by statute to the Transportation Department. As Marlo Lewis and I have noted repeatedly, this is an unconstitutional
step on a road to economic devastation.

However, in the light of recent events, this quote in particular caught my eye:

Gloria Bergquist, vice president at the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said . . . “We have a hill to climb, and it’s steep, so we will need consumers to buy…

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The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.  Only one MP dissented from its conclusions.  There seem to me to be some serious errors and omissions in the reports, but I’m not the only one.  For instance, Fred Pearce of New Scientist and The Guardian has some pretty serious things to say in his story, Hacked climate email inquiry…

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For many years, the climate alarmist movement pushed the development of corn ethanol as the “fuel of the future” on the grounds that it would decrease fossil fuel emissions. As I detail in my book, The Really Inconvenient Truths, massive efforts were devoted to promoting this technology, with a textbook baptist-bootlegger alliance between green groups and Big Corn (most notably Archer Daniels Midland).  Politicians joined in happily, with Al Gore stumping for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar because of her support…

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For many years, the climate alarmist movement pushed the development of corn ethanol as the “fuel of the future” on the grounds that it would decrease fossil fuel emissions. As I detail in my book, The Really Inconvenient Truths, massive efforts were devoted to promoting this technology, with a textbook baptist-bootlegger alliance between green groups and Big Corn (most notably Archer Daniels Midland).  Politicians joined in happily, with Al Gore stumping for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar because of her support…

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I have a piece in National Review Online today outlining the fantasy behind Sen. Lindsey Graham’s latest attempt to keep cap-and-trade alive. Here’s the beginning:

After declaring energy cap-and-trade “dead” in the Senate, the Left’s new favorite Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has been working hard to resurrect it under another name. Working with Senators Kerry (D., Mass.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.), along with lobbyists for the major electric utilities (and, err, Big Oil), Senator Graham appears to have come…

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