Category Archives: Commentaries Essays

If you want to understand how it is that the debate over global warming policies became so shrill, consider the recent pattern of behavior by the country’s second-most blogger, Joe Romm.

From living in virtual darkness to minutely measuring their water-use, greens’ fixation with carbon counting is verging on a mental illness.

On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain’s largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article’s allegation–that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)–is easy to refute. More troubling… Read More »

    For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.   [Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]    

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

All great national powers have relied on access to and control of large quantities of natural resources, including energy and foodstuffs, to maintain their influence and status. Government policy that limits access to these resources must certainly weaken the nation as a whole.

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009 is worse than nothing: it is a con and a fraud. It pretends to be a vehicle for reductions in CO2E emissions. In fact it is designed to permit increases in CO2E emissions.

Discussions about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out “impure” thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy.

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel… Read More »

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.