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 [...]

Many readers here are also familiar with the United Liberty blog, not least because our contributor Jason Pye is the editor-in-chief of that blog, and co-contributor Doug writes at both locations.
They (Jason and UL Assistant Editor Brett Bittner) recently honored me be asking that I join them as a guest on their podcast, [...]

Fortunately for humanity and the civilization that sustains it, Barack Obama stayed true to his record of incompetence and failure, messing up the talks at Copenhagen.  The talks have ended with nothing more than yet another agreement to meet again in a few years’ time. His last ditch instructions to Hillary Clinton, which led to [...]

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 [...]

All, if you’ve followed the ClimateGate scandal, you’ll note that most coverage on both the left and the right centers around the emails. There is discussion in the emails of trying to influence access to peer-reviewed journals to stop critics (unethical), and even some suggestions that data requested under FOIA be deleted (potentially illegal). [...]

We will probably never know precisely why the senior staff at the Climate Research Unit decided to quit being scientists in order to take up the profession of Cargo Cult Scientist. It could be the celebrity of being known as leading researchers. It could be a genuine fear that if they didn’t lie, humanity would make the “wrong” decision and render the Earth uninhabitable. It could be a totalitarian desire to rework society according to blue-prints that were pleasing to them. It could be because they wanted the lucrative grant money. It could be that they feared being viewed as has-been or never-were hacks.

What we can tell, though, is that their fraud was predicated on their inexhaustible supply of grants from governments, grants that transferred an uninterruptible stream of taxes into their coffers. The system was such that these Cargo Cult scientists were able to establish themselves as authorities, and suborn the skeptical review of and replication of their work, and, for a time, act in an environment that lacked negative consequences for their misconduct. That is, until someone blew the whistle.

I’ve not been kind to the forces for ethanol. I’ve pointed out that demand for ethanol raises the price of food for poor people, how I’ve felt the pinch personally in increased prices for homebrew supplies, how the use of ethanol is wasting scarce water resources. Finally, I pointed out that ethanol actually [...]

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 [...]

Coming from Ezra Klein –
Via Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias comes the depressing news that the vast majority of the public doesn’t know what cap and trade” is. And I don’t mean in the sense that they don’t understand the auctions. They have no idea what problem the policy actually refers to.
“Given a choice [...]

21 pages of paper is apparently worth $30 billion taxpayer dollars — if you are too big to fail, that is. That’s 1,428,571,428.57 bucks per page. Here’s how ABC reports the story:
An AIG report to the Treasury Department last month warned that if the government didn’t come to its rescue again, its collapse [...]

The bad news is that the environmental movement wishes to interfere with our bowel movements. From the tree killers at The NY Times:
The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent [...]

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 [...]

Apparently, our new President likes to crank up the thermostat:
WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had [...]

For a long time, I’ve been pissed off about Daylight Savings Time. In my job, I work with a lot of people across the country, and thus I get into work early (7:30 or so) and leave about 5:00 PM. Before it went into effect this year, each morning I would drive to [...]

Many progressives are looking forward to increased government oversight over the auto industry. They see this as a chance to influence the types of vehicles that are produced and to dictate that production be turned to socially beneficial uses, including the manufacture of green cars that auto manufacturers are not manufacturing. These vehicles [...]

Both Obama and McCain suggest that with a cap-and-trade scheme, we can make headway against global climate change. Without getting into the debate over whether climate change is real or man-made, I think it’s clear that any climate change avoidance techniques America engages upon will not make a lick of difference to what China [...]

Time has an ongoing series which advocates the need for “voluntary” national service. In the magazine’s latest article by Managing Editor Richard Stengel, the author praises both John McCain and Barack Obama for their urging of Americans to “serve interests greater than self.”
It is a unique moment for the idea of national service. You [...]