Climate Alarmism Reconsidered

The energy challenges of resource depletion, security of supply and pollution have been effectively addressed by market entrepreneurship, technology, and measured regulation. The remaining sustainability issue for carbon-based energy reliance is anthropogenic or man-made climate change. "Climate Alarmism Reconsidered" demonstrates how the balance of evidence supports a benign enhanced greenhouse effect, and how the case for mandatory greenhouse gas reductions depends on unrealistic assumptions. Government intervention in the name of energy sustainability is the major threat to real energy sustainability and the provision of affordable, reliable energy to growing economies worldwide. Free-market structures and the wealth generated by markets help communities to best adapt to climate change. This multi-disciplinary study concludes that climate alarmism and its corollary, policy activism, are unwarranted and counterproductive for the developed world and particularly for the world's energy poor. Every few decades the intellectual community becomes obsessed with some energy 'problem' to which it can see no solution and calls for intervention by governments and international bodies to save the world. In the 1970s, the perceived problem was an imminent energy shortage; today the issue is climate change. 177 Pages.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. is CEO and Founder of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston, Texas and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Texas. He is author of The Mirage of Oil Protection (1989), Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (2 volumes: 1996), and Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (2000), in addition to many shorter studies on energy history and policy. He received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award for 2002 in recognition of his work on energy sustainability issues.