Just a brief note to recommend the reading of Tim Worstall’s Chasing Rainbows: How the Green Agenda Defeats Its Aims.

For fullest enjoyment, understand from the start that you must imagine its whole text being said aloud by an Englishman in a tone riddled with sarcasm. Think of Fawlty Towers or some such.

Worstall, a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, is an economist and businessman. His “Introduction” actually teaches some basic economic principles, such as comparative advantage and the importance of cost/benefit analysis. The rest of the book niftily applies those principles to a variety of environmental questions, such as the advisability of recycling, the choice of energy generating systems, and whether to tax or cap-and-trade carbon dioxide emissions (or simply leave them alone).

It’s a funny book, and a brutal one, showing time after time that what environmentalists prescribe will achieve precisely the opposite of what they intend—or, at best, something entirely different and perhaps unrelated.

 

 

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