Keith Lockitch — VOICES for REASON

I sometimes receive questions from readers such as the following:

Q: I consider myself a strong free-market advocate and a fan of Ayn Rand’s writings. However, I find your denial of rising global temperatures to be contradictory to Rand’s view that we should follow the facts of reality based on reason and objective knowledge. You are not a climate scientist (your bio says “PhD in theoretical physics”), so how are you qualified to draw conclusions about global warming? If the only fact we have on which to base a conclusion is that many experts support the existence of global warming, then isn’t it only rational, under Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, to conclude that global warming is, in fact, a problem?

Here’s my answer:

A: First of all, let me clarify that I am not in “denial of rising global temperatures.” There is no question that the earth is warmer today than it has been since the start of systematic thermometer records. But it is also true that the start of that record happens to coincide with the end of a relatively cold period in recent climate history—one characterized by a little ice age. The issue is not whether temperatures are warmer today than they were a century ago, but whether the increase in global temperature can be solidly attributed to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of developments on the climate front suggest that the tide has turned somewhat for promoters of green climate policy:

• Although Congress has been working for months on a climate change bill that would impose a carbon rationing scheme (cap and trade) on the U.S. economy, and although the House version passed by a narrow margin in June—the Senate version is struggling badly.

• The world is gearing up for a major climate conference in Copenhagen (Dec. 7-18)—which has long been anticipated by climate activists as the chance to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012. But it’s looking less and less likely that the conference will produce any sort of strong, binding agreement.

• A recent Pew poll suggests that fewer Americans see global warming as a “very serious” problem, and the more people hear about cap and trade, the less they support it. (Those who describe themselves as having “heard a lot” about cap and trade tend to oppose it by two-to-one.)

Does this mean that those of us who oppose green climate policies are winning? Is the battle over this issue almost over? Far from it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Environmentalists claim, with ever-increasing hysteria, that our consumption of carbon-based energy in pursuit of prosperity and economic growth is altering the earth’s climate. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the world’s energy, in favor of carbon-free sources.

Yet, at the same time, environmentalist groups have vehemently opposed, as unacceptable intrusions on nature, projects involving every alternative form of energy ever proposed to replace fossil fuels—including such supposedly green ventures as wind farms and solar power plants. Here’s the latest example:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Karen Armstrong, author of numerous books on religion, and Richard Dawkins, author of numerous books on evolution and atheism, to answer the question: “Where does evolution leave God?”

What I found most interesting about the exchange was an issue that neither discussed explicitly, but which lurked just beneath the surface of their answers: the fact that religion has co-opted the entire realm of the spiritual.

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In all of President Obama’s health care speech, there is one key sentence that reveals our leaders’ basic method of approaching the problem. It also makes clear why our health care system just keeps getting worse and why nothing that Congress passes will do anything to truly solve this mess.

Here is the relevant section, with the sentence highlighted in bold: Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on “small hydro” projects—hydroelectric power plants involving small dams on streams and tributaries, as opposed to giant dams on major rivers. Because hydro produces zero greenhouse gas emissions, these projects are being promoted by power companies hoping to avoid the fierce green opposition to carbon-based energy.

But environmentalists have also fiercely opposed hydro for decades, because massive dams flood large areas and dramatically alter waterways. (This list of Sierra Club “accomplishments” boasts of killing dam projects as far back as 1923.) The Journal story suggests that with small hydro, electricity producers are hoping to fly under the green radar by building smaller dams in remote locations.

The problem is that these hydro plants have a tiny generating capacity: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just had an article on climate policy published in the journal Energy and Environment. It will appear in a special issue of the journal focusing on “Climate Policy and Energy Poverty.”

The article takes what I think is a pretty unique approach to the topic. I don’t focus on the science of climate change–i.e., I don’t specifically address the question of whether or not man-made greenhouse gases are the dominant agents driving the earth’s climate (though I don’t accept the ubiquitous assertion that they are). Instead, I address an entirely different question; one that I think the proponents of climate change alarm ignore completely.

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The senate voted yesterday to extend the “Cash for Clunkers” program–a piece of Obama’s economic stimulus agenda in which the government doles out up to $4,500 for people to trade in older vehicles (the engines of which are then destroyed) for new cars that meet a government fuel efficiency standard.

Calling this “crackpot economics,” the Wall Street Journal points out that “the subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway.”

Isn’t taking money from some people, giving it to others, and pretending that this creates wealth the essence of what Bernie Madoff was doing? The fact that Congress is doing it openly, with the sanction of law and under the guidance of Ivy League economists, doesn’t make it any less unjust.

One of the “clean energy” sources promoted by environmentalists is geothermal–energy derived from the natural heat deep below the earth’s surface. Unlike solar or wind power, which are intermittent and therefore unreliable sources of energy, geothermal heat is always present. It doesn’t require vast installations of unsightly, noisy wind turbines or immense arrays of mirrors or solar cells, and it produces no emissions whatsoever (except perhaps some water vapor from cooling units).

But before you cue the chorus of green hallelujahs in praise of geothermal, you might want to take a look at a recent New York Times article that points out one little problem with the primary method of extracting geothermal energy: it causes earthquakes.

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I my last post I mentioned Richard Lindzen’s keynote address at the Heartland Institute’s climate change conference. Another talk that I found especially interesting was the one by Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor from King Juan Carlos University in Spain. (Videos of this talk and most of the others are available at the conference website.)

Calzada is the lead author of a study that attacks the myth of economy-boosting “green jobs.” President Obama has cited Spain’s green energy initiatives as a model for the United States to follow. But Calzada and his colleagues argue that the Spanish programs have been an economy-killing disaster, with more than two jobs lost for every “green job” siphoned from the market economy through taxation.

It is completely bizarre for the Obama administration to hold up this job-destroying program as a curative for an economy that’s already on the ropes due to massive government intervention in finance, health care, and energy. If Obama finds any more ways like these to “boost” the economy, it won’t be long before we have no economy left.