RUTHFULLY YOURS

Should Donald Trump be elected this fall, he should waste no time in reversing Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. He not only overstepped his authority, he set the country directly on a course that will bring nothing but trouble.

Acting like the authoritarian that the Democrats and media claim that Donald Trump is, Biden, with a pen and maybe a phone, has ordered through his Environmental Protection Agency to issue a rule that will require Americans to replace their internal-combustion engine automobiles with battery-powered cars. The rule doesn’t require Americans to buy electric vehicles, nor does it directly outlaw the sale of automobiles that run on gasoline.

But in effect, it is a mandate and a ban.

Forcing the country into EVs is an egregious abuse of power by executive edict. Biden’s rule has been referred to, for good reason, as “a “crackdown on cars,” a “bloodbath” for consumers and an example of chutzpah. American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers wisely suggests that “the American people need to rise up against this rule and reject it.”

Yes, he has a financial interest in making that statement. But he knows, as do many, that the booted regulatory regime we’re living under “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans,” as Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University law professor, wrote in his 2014 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-alarmists-bad-science-warming-temperature-05846239?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I debunked research by the Federal Reserve and top academic economists on the economics of climate change. An author of a paper I debunked then said that three professors from Stanford and Berkeley had done a much better analysis of temperature and growth in an article they published in Nature. I took up the challenge and scrutinized their article. My critique appears in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.

The Nature article is in the top 0.1% of academic economics publications by citations, and it has received glowing press coverage. I downloaded their data and found that, as with the other articles I debunked, the results don’t hold up under scrutiny.

The authors claim that there is an optimal average temperature of 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit for economic growth. Countries colder or warmer than that grow more slowly. The authors then use one of the most extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates of warming up to the year 2100 and calculate for each country how much more or less growth that warming would cause. They then calculate the difference in world gross domestic product with warming and without.

Greenland, with an average temperature of 25 degrees, would benefit from warming. The U.S., average temperature 56, would be relatively unaffected. Niger, average temperature 83, would see lower growth from warming. Adding up all countries, the authors say warming would reduce world GDP per capita by 23%.

Every country, from St. Vincent in the Caribbean to China has the same influence on their result. Weighting by population nearly eliminates that result, and adjusting for correlated observations and dropping one or two unusual observations eliminates it completely. The observations aren’t independent, because countries clustered in regions and observations close in time have similar patterns of growth and temperature. An example of an unusual observation is Greenland in 1990. A large mine that generated 12% of Greenland’s GDP closed that year, and not because it happened to be 2 degrees cooler than normal.