“Saving the planet” should be an unbeatable political slogan. Yet consistently the imagined “green wave” mindlessly embraced by most of the media continues to fall short, as evidenced by recent elections in Canada and Australia, as well as across much of Europe.

These results reflect climate scientist Roger Pielke’s 2010 notion of “the iron law of climate policy.” Pielke noted that support for reducing greenhouse emissions is limited by the amount of sacrifice demanded. “People will pay some amount for climate goals,” he noted, “but only so much.” Read more

Planners and other elites threaten the long-established pleasures of life in Australia.

Few places on earth are better suited for middle-class prosperity than Australia. From early in its history, when it was a refuge for British convicts, the vast, resource-rich country has provided an ideal environment for upward mobility, from the pioneering ranches of the nineteenth century to the middle-class suburbs of the late twentieth. Journalist Donald Horne described Australia in 1964 as “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”

Over the last decade, though, Australia’s luck has changed, as the country develops many of the pathologies of crowded, socially divided societies like the United Kingdom or the United States. Read more