Germany’s Green Energy Fixation Should Teach US a Lesson

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Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government vice chancellor and economic minister Robert Habeck, a leading member of his country’s Green Party, has experienced a rude lesson regarding the disastrous consequences of his years of naïve opposition to fossil fuels. After tasking his top officials to assess the energy security implications of Germany’s dependence on Russian supplies in […]

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Income Distribution and Inequality

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Italian economist and engineer Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) conjectured that for any population, income naturally follows a log-normal distribution. The normal, or Gaussian distribution ranges from negative to positive infinity with a central mean. Because logarithms are always positive, the log-normal distribution ranges from zero to positive infinity with a positive mean, consistent with there being

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Recovering the Moral Foundations of Economics

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Editor’s note: This piece was originally published by the Acton Institute over a decade ago. Many years later, this piece still provides a poignant reflection on economics, socialism, environmentalism, and Christian ethics.  During the summer of 1980, I met weekly for breakfast, prayer, and study with a minister friend of mine. A warm-hearted, intelligent man,

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A ‘Plan B’ for addressing climate change and the energy transition

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I have a new article published in the latest issue of International Affairs Forum. The topic of this issue is Climate Change and Energy. Mine is one of twenty papers. A range of topics are covered. My article is the least alarmed among them. You may recognize several of the authors, which include Don Wuebbles and

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Will Young Conservatives Embrace the Ideology of Climate Change?

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I came of age politically in the age of William F. Buckley, Jr, and Ronald Reagan, which means I escaped being indoctrinated into the progressive ideology behind John Maynard Keynes’ economics and Rachel Carson’s environmentalism. So I was baffled by a recent article in World Magazine discussing how many of today’s young “conservatives” embrace the ideas I avoided

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Federal District Court Enjoins Use Of The “Social Cost Of Carbon”

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In the U.S. so far, efforts to enact legislation in Congress to “save the planet” by restricting fossil fuels and transforming our energy economy have gone almost entirely nowhere. President Obama’s big idea of “cap and trade” legislation died early in his first term and was never resurrected. President Biden’s “Green New Deal” has so

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