AEI’s Ben Zycher’s latest letter in the Wall Street Journal is excellent:
In an otherwise useful reminder of why the much-ballyhooed “transition” to unconventional energy won’t happen anytime soon—because the massive attendant costs can’t be borne by most of the world’s people confronted by the difficult realities of eking out a living—Bjorn Lomborg (“When the Only Problem Was Climate,” op-ed, May 9) nonetheless tries to have it both ways. He argues that the world should “ramp up investments in green innovation, eventually driving the cost of clean energy below that of fossil fuels.”
Why, without massive subsidies, does the private sector fail to invest in such innovation in pursuit of a competitive advantage? Answer: The unconcentrated energy content of wind flows, sunlight and other green fantasies means that it is very unlikely that their costs ever will fall below those of fossil fuels, which are also likely to enjoy the benefits of innovation. Further, it is misleading to describe unconventional energy as “clean,” shunting aside the heavy metal pollution, wildlife destruction and myriad other environmental problems caused by such energy.
Benjamin Zycher
American Enterprise Institute
Long, Beach, Wash.
David Henderson corrects Angus Deaton on inflation adjustors.
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino wisely calls for the privatization of airports. A slice:
Privatized airports frequently rank highly on surveys of the best airports in the world. Some of the world’s largest airports are privatized, such as Paris Charles de Gaulle, London Heathrow, and Frankfurt. If you’ve flown to Cancún any time since 1998, you used a privatized airport.
Barry Brownstein decries the illiberalism of young people.
It has become fairly standard practice in the press to take voices on the fringe and shove them to the center of the conversation without contextualizing where they came from. Journalists are incentivized to find engaging angles, and fringe characters tend to be interesting. The impulse is understandable. But it creates a distorted picture of reality and comes at the expense of the truth. And journalists should foremost be invested in conveying the truth.
I fear that Virginia Postrel is correct: (HT Arnold Kling)
What has happened to the LP, the libertarian movement, and much of the Republican party is that the partisans of natural liberty have abandoned the ideal of Feigenbaum Freiheit. They don’t want to be left alone. They don’t want to live and let live. They aren’t happy with peace and prosperity. They want to fight against those who are not in their clan, however they may define it.
Vance Ginn likes Corey DeAngelis’s case for school choice.
Tunku Varadarajan reviews Glenn Loury’s memoir, Late Admissions. A slice:
The subsequent rejection of liberalism [DBx: progressivism] —and his rebirth as a conservative—came in large part as a reaction to President Obama, whom he describes as “a political operator” whose “self-presentation as an icon of American blackness” struck Mr. Loury as “absurd.” His return to the conservative fold was also hastened, he tells us, by Black Lives Matter, demanding allegiance to a belief that present-day America is “the New Jim Crow” beset by “the machinations of white supremacy at every turn.”
