Pun Salad

This book is a counterweight and rebuttal to what the author, Alex Epstein, calls the "mainstream knowledge system" in the realm of fossil fuels and climate change. Epstein previously wrote The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which I enjoyed (my book report here). He makes a (very) expanded argument in this book.

He says that fossil fuels are uniquely suited to provide our current and future energy needs. The have huge and irreplaceable advantages over "green" energy sources, which remain a small fraction of our energy picture, even after decades of subsidies and green propaganda. Simply speaking, trying to get rid of fossil fuel use will only make our lives miserable, as we come to depend on unreliable solar and wind sources. Not to mention the current fraction of poor people, who our policies will doom to remain poor.

Also: the doom predicted by the catastrophizers if we don't mend our sinful energy ways is (to put it mildly) unlikely. In fact, fossil fuel use will allow us to mitigate any possible climate-change scenarios.

People will react in horror to this denial of the "mainstream" consensus. Epstein argues that the "knowledge system" is biased against showing the benefits of fossil fuel use, which are many. We are presented daily with a mythic, and misanthropic, picture of the delicate, benevolent ecosystem that's only harmed by the impact of humanity. An ideal world, in this view, would be one where we would have no impact. As if humans didn't exist at all.

Epstein says: fiddlesticks. Beautiful as Mother Nature is, left to her own devices she can be a psycho killer bitch, visiting upon humanity plagues, pestilence, fires, floods, droughts, … bringing death to many thousands at a whack. And it's only due to our massive investments and innovations in fossil energy that we've managed to avoid the worst of that.

I had some problems with the Epstein's writing style, unfortunately. It's repetitive; he's a big fan of "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you've just told them." He latches onto various words and phrases, and uses them over and over: e.g., "human flourishing framework" (as opposed to the "anti-impact framework"); "climate mastery"; "arguing to 100"; "machine labor"; "ultra-cost-effective"; "delicate nurturer"; etc. It's a long book (430 pages of text in the hardback) and this just makes it longer. And also seem longer.

It may be pretty lousy on economic freedom (ranking #41 among the 50 states in the latest Fraser institute study), but: New Jersey Law Prohibits Book Bans in Public, School Libraries.

So their long Fahremheit 451 nightmare is over, finally. David Zimmerman keeps a straight face while he reports:

Jim Geraghty sums up that last paragraph: You're Not Allowed to Ban Any More Books, Except the Ones That Deserve It. From the law itself:

“Censorship” means to block, suppress, or remove library material based on disagreement with a viewpoint, idea, or concept, or solely because an individual finds certain content offensive, but does not include limiting or restricting access to any library material deemed developmentally inappropriate for certain students.

So ‥ less than meets the eye, says Jim:

Meanwhile, if Governor Phil really wants to improve the liberty of New Jersey citizens, he might want to concentrate on getting that Fraser ranking up.

Also of note:

• And it will not be televised. Based on recent murders, Jeff Maurer complains: This Proletariat Revolution Sure Is Taking Its Sweet-Ass Time.

  I would summarize Lenin’s contributions to communist theory as: “Fuck this — let’s just do it ourselves.” Marx believed in a historical process in which agricultural laborers would move to cities and became the proletariat, and proletariat anger would overthrow capitalism. Lenin noticed that the Russian underclass weren’t storming out of their factories and overthrowing the Czar; they were mostly harvesting wheat by hand and going to church. So, he decided to give history a li’l boost, with “li’l boost” being the cutest euphemism that you’ll ever hear for a bloody revolution.

  Deep befuddlement at the proletariat revolution's stubborn refusal to arrive seems to be the default state of leftist thought. And I’ve been thinking about that state of mind this week, as leftists seized on the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as possible evidence that THIS — FINALLY!!! — was the moment when popular anger had begun to boil over. But now a suspect is in custody, and he’s not a downtrodden laborer appalled by the depravities of capitalism: He’s an Ivy League graduate from a wealthy Maryland family. How wealthy? Well, students at Loyola University Maryland might be familiar with thee Mangione Aquatic Center, named for the alleged shooter’s grandparents. And that pool might be due for a rebrand now that that name sounds a little bit like “Manson Field House” or “The Bin Laden Baseball/Softball Complex”.

  (Inspiration for this item's headline here. Ah, good times.)

  Also piling on the irony is Kevin D. Williamson, who writes about The Country Club Radical.

  The fact that the man who has been charged in the shot-in-the-back murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson is a literal country club radical—Thompson comes from a working class background, the killer’s family made a fortune in the golf course business—is almost too on-the-nose.

  Because the killer has been celebrated by certain grotesques on the left as a kind of folk hero, the right will, of course, try to make of him a millstone to hang around the collective neck of their perceived politico-cultural enemies across the aisle. (It is tempting to imagine what that daft chiseling lunatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be saying right now if he were not, incredible as it is to write, up for a Cabinet appointment.) That kind of project usually is foolish. What we know about the killer so far is that his friends and family seemed to be worried about him and that he was something of a Unabomber groupie. These people tend to be politically mixed up: Think of Charles Manson, the good-time hippie prophet with the swastika carved into his forehead; Mark David Chapman, who tried to drop himself into The Catcher in the Rye by murdering John Lennon but who would have taken Johnny Carson as a consolation prize; John Salvi, who carried out shootings at abortion clinics motivated by his belief that abortion is a great evil and … that the Freemasons and the Mafia and the Vatican were engaged in a vast conspiracy to manipulate fiat currencies.

  Well, that explains it.

• Credit where it's due. David Henderson approves of this bit of Trump's Meet the Press interview:

  First, Trump notes that the huge increase in California for fast-food restaurants (he doesn’t mention fast food—he mentions restaurants) is wiping out some restaurants. He could have noted that that means some jobs were lost but I think that was implicit.

  Second, Trump says that it doesn’t make much sense to have a high minimum wage for the whole country, given the disparity in cost of living. He gives as examples Alabama and Mississippi, where the cost of living is low. So the federal $7.25 an hour goes a long way.

  Trump could have mentioned that even in those two southern states, only a small percent of people make the minimum wage and most make well above $7.25 an hour. He also could have then pointed out that that means that market forces drive wages above the federal minimum. It’s possible that that’s what he meant when he said that $8 or $9 an hour wouldn’t have much effect.

  It would have been asking too much, probably, for Trump to make the libertarian argument: if an employer and an employee come to agreement on the employee's wage rate, the government should mind its own damn business.

  You know, an attitude like Tim Walz briefly pretended he was in favor of.

• But, alas… Jacob Sullum finds fault in a different part of the MTP interview: Trump, the Self-Described 'Tariff Man,' Does Not Understand How Tariffs Work.

  "I'm a big believer in tariffs," President-elect Donald Trump said this week, not for the first time. "I think they're beautiful."

  Trump claims the heavy tariffs he plans to impose during his second term are "going to make us rich," at no cost to American businesses or consumers. That is a dangerous fantasy.

  Trump's position on tariffs begins with his longstanding misconceptions about international trade, which he erroneously views as a zero-sum game with rules that are rigged against the United States. "We're subsidizing Canada to the tune (of) over $100 billion a year," he told Kristen Welker on "Meet the Press." "We're subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion."

  That's not true, as Jacob goes on to point out.

  (I think I'm going to start referring to all authors I link to by their first names. Or initials. I'm sure they won't mind. Or even be aware.)

• And finally, something on which we can all agree. In our last article from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue, Robby Soave says we should Abolish the TSA.

  In response to 9/11, President George W. Bush created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), bringing the country's myriad airport security protocols under one central authority. Two decades later, the results of this experiment are a complete disaster. The agency has not made air travel safer. The agency has merely made it costlier and more time-consuming to fly.

  The TSA has some 58,000 employees and a budget of $11.8 billion for FY 2025. Its ever-changing screening process involves forcing passengers to wait in long lines, remove their shoes and sweaters, place their electronics in separate bins, and throw away liquids over a certain size (or to fork over a fee and personal information for TSA PreCheck). TSA agents riffle through luggage in search of contraband items and subject travelers to aggressive pat-downs of their genitals. Navigating these intrusive procedures often requires showing up to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be necessary, creating inefficiencies for the airlines and their customers. A Cornell University study suggests that some people choose to drive long distances rather than fly in order to avoid the headaches associated with airport security, which is both a financial loss for the airline industry and a net negative for safety—per mile traveled, car travel is much, much more dangerous than flying.

  More at the link, but: the TSA is demonstrably bad at its useless job. Elon and Vivek, do your thing.