Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.

Warren is local to me (he lives about three miles away actually), and runs both the excellent libertarian small business and economics blog CoyoteBlog, and the absolutely essential climate blog Climate Skeptic.

As a libertarian, I spend a lot of time railing against idiotic government giveaways. The TARP, the Porkulus Stimulus, and Cash For Clunkers all took copious levels of heat. I derided them for various reasons:
TARP: Notwithstanding the wide-ranging areas this money was targeted to (i.e. auto bailouts) and the fact that when it [...]

Anyone who is really paying attention to the global warming debate will notice that reducing carbon emissions and wealth distribution go hand-in-hand.
Or do they?
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote a very interesting article which makes very much the opposite point.
The goals of the climate change crowd are not reduction in global warming but [...]

Over at the Master Resource Blog,  law professor Gail Heriot points out the similarities between global warming, fear-monger Al Gore and Xhosa Prophetess Nongqawuse:
Nongqawuse was a teenager and a member of the Xhosa tribe in South Africa.  One day in April or May of 1856, she went down to the river to fetch water.  When [...]

Homeowners’ Associations are one of life’s little sour tastes of government. Petty meddling nannies who tell you that you can’t do X, or that you must do Y, in order to keep the neighborhood “uniform” or somesuch. Sadly, it’s also a microcosm for most peoples’ reactions to government. When it’s a neighbor [...]

I happen to live in Arizonas 5th congressional district; and am currently represented in the house by Harry Mitchell.
Congressman Mitchell and I disagree about a lot of things. Abortion, social security and government health care, school choice and education policy, many economic issues, government intervention and regulations in general, and the overall wisdom of his [...]

Barack Obama is making the same disastrous mistake that George Bush did, and I am amazed that neither he nor his advisers are aware of it.
Many people have commented that Obama has effectively given Pelosi and Reid free rein to insert as much prok as they wish into their spending bills while pontificating in mock [...]

This is the single best, and clearest, explanation of the Rationalist Position on global warming I’ve Ever Seen

Key line: “So, why don’t we ever talk about the suns contribution to global warming? …Well, because we can’t regulate it, tax it, or make it feel guilty for what it’s doing“.
Got it in one there friend.
There’s [...]

Last week, I posted about my belief that oil has currently dropped to a price level that is damaging to the long-term stability of the oil market, and that while it seems wonderful right now, it won’t last.
Today we find a bit of evidence that may only support this point:
The $25 low-end estimate [Francisco] Blanch [...]

No, not for the reason these guys think:
Venezuela will back repeated cuts in OPEC oil production until prices stabilize, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez says, and Russia is proposing closer cooperation with the oil cartel.
Ramirez said Wednesday that his country will back a proposed 1 million barrel per day cut when OPEC meets Saturday in Cairo. [...]

In IEEE’s flagship magazine, Spectrum, there is a fairly idiotic editorial warning Europeans against buying natural gas from Russia.
Why can’t the European Union just adopt a strategy of energy independence and wean itself from Russia and the “stans”?
Of course, there is no way for Europe to be “independent” with respect to natural gas. [...]

The City Club of Cleveland extended an invitation to the top six presidential candidates*. Of the six candidates, Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, and independent candidate Ralph Nader participated; Democrat Barack Obama, Republican John McCain, and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney were no-shows.
Unlike the debates we have already seen [...]

Ed Schafer, US Secretary of Agriculture, seems to think we need to bail out the ethanol industry:
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer’s statement on Oct. 17 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture could provide ethanol companies that got into trouble by speculating on corn with up to $25 million per company in refinancing has caused a firestorm [...]

Cont’d from Part 1
What motivates these very nice people to be such tyrants? Some will vote in ignorance of the issue* and others out of a sense of ‘social justice.’ Very few will intentionally vote to take liberty or property from a fellow citizen; most will vote to do so out of a well intentioned [...]

Now that the conventions are over, it’s time to separate the facts from the fiction. With so much misinformation being peddled by the political campaigns (not to mention rumors spread through e-mail, the internet and the MSM), this is very often a difficult task. My approach is to be skeptical until I am satisfied that [...]

Ron Paul spoke in front of a crowd of approximately 10,000 at the “Rally for the Republic” (AKA the “Ron Paul Convention”) across the river from the Republican National Convention.
Below are the first 3 parts of his speech, the full text of the speech can be read here.

Other speakers on the last [...]

California, in an attempt to fix the housing mess* by making houses less affordable by making you buy features you wouldn’t otherwise**, has announced new statewide building restrictions to go “green”.
From the Governator on down, nanny statists in California are more than willing to use force to make your life more expensive, and are quite [...]

Senator Warner has a brilliant idea how to reduce gas prices; force Americans to consume less at gun point:
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency given current technology. He said he wants to know if the administration might support efforts in Congress [...]

In barbaric cultures, when people find themselves facing unpleasant changes, like the failure of crops or natural disasters, they look for scapegoats to blame. In the Europe and early colonial America, all to often the quest for a scapegoat took the form of a persecuting old women, who were charged with having used magic to [...]

The government likes to support biodiesel. It has all the buzzwords. “Recycling”. “Sustainable”. “Environmentally-friendly”. So they subsidize efforts to blend diesel with biodiesel.
One main problem here. Americans don’t use much diesel. So they’re subsidizing foreign, not domestic, use. In fact, they’re simply sending money for non-American-produced diesel [...]