KOSA Negates the Government’s Law Enforcement Responsibility

A bill known as the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, passed the U.S. Senate by a 91 - 3 margin. It now [8/3/24] goes to the House of Representatives for consideration.

The bill is not what the title implies. It is much more . . . and much worse.

Reason’s Elizabeth Brown observes: 

The Kids Online Safety Act would have cataclysmic effects on free speech and privacy online.

"Bills like KOSA cynically hide censorship behind the mantle of child protection. Tell Sen. Schumer and other lawmakers to reject KOSA," urged the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

In a New York Times article, Senate Passes Child Online Safety Bill, Sending It to an Uncertain House Fate, Maya Miller reports

The centerpiece of the legislation would create a “duty of care” for social networking platforms that mandates they protect minors against mental health disorders and from abuse, sexual exploitation and other harms. Companies could be held liable for failing to filter out content or limit features that could lead to those adverse impacts. [My emphasis]

What content can anyone say does not fit with "could lead to adverse impacts? What would not  be included is such a vague mandate as “duty of care?”

A second measure included in the package would strengthen privacy protections for anyone under 17 and ban targeted advertising to children and teens. It would create an “eraser button” for parents and children, requiring companies to permit users to delete personal information.

Despite the lop-sided vote margin, the bill has notable critics.

The bill faces strong pushback from technology companies, who argue it would place unacceptable burdens on them to moderate content and verify users’ ages, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that contend it would restrict free speech. In the Senate, the measure generated narrow but intense opposition despite several rounds of redrafting to address such concerns.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, recently called the bill “the Pandora’s box of unintended consequences,” arguing it would stifle First Amendment-protected speech. Other critics, such as Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said they were worried that limiting children’s access to certain content on social media could further isolate vulnerable youths, including L.G.B.T.Q. young people who often rely on online communities for a sense of belonging and acceptance.

Count me among the opponents.

The Washington Post also reported on the passage of the bill (Senate passes landmark bills to protect kids online, raising pressure on House).

I posted this WAPO Comment:

Note what the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) does NOT do—hold the people who actually create and post the harmful content accountable. Instead of doing their duty to identify and prosecute the guilty, the politicians are going after the social media companies. If a crime is planned around a dinner in a restaurant; or committed using the Verizon phone network; or committed using the public roads, would it be right to charge that restaurant owner, Verizon, or the government for the wrong-doing? Yet that is the position that the social media companies, which are no different IN KIND, are being forced into with this horrifically misleading bill. 

Yes, KOSA is a threat to free speech and privacy, as the opponents argue. But it is also a massive abnegation by the political class in its primary function to identify criminal activity, make the necessary laws, and enforce the laws against the guilty while protecting the innocent.* In effect, the bill shifts that function from government, where it belongs, to private enterprise. Under the smokescreen of “kids safety,” KOSA is a massive inversion of the purpose of law and of justice: It evades the guilty and targets innocent third parties.

We should demand that the politicians do their jobs; go after the guilty, rather than take the easy, politically expedient course of making technology companies the scapegoats. 

* [I am indebted to Jon Hersey for pointing out this little-discussed aspect of this and similar laws targeting social media companies. Hersey wrote “Many of the bureaucrats and commentators behind these laws and initiatives against social-media companies share essentially the same tactic. They blame social-media companies for not doing what governments are supposed to do—protect individual rights—and then rationalize that this supposed failure is grounds for doing what governments are not supposed to do—violate individual rights.”]

Related Reading:

Social Media and the Future of Civil Society by Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard

Senate To Vote on Web Censorship Bill Disguised as Kids Safety by Elizabeth Brown for Reason

Linda Stamato’s Broad Attack on Our Intellectual Freedom

Censorship-By-Proxy is Real, and it's Here

The End of the Free Internet Is Near: The idea that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone has been turned on its head. -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH for Reason

HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

Review of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media by Michael Dahlen for The Objective Standard

A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media By Heidi Tworek for The Atlantic

Trump Joins Biden in War on the Average Person’s Newfound Power to be Heard

The Separation of Press and State

The death of local news has been greatly exaggerated. That’s the message that comes across loud and clear in a revealing Washington Post report by Leonard Downie Jr., The rebirth of local news depends on all of us. Downie reports:

You’ve heard local news is dying. In fact, it might just be evolving.

Look around: Online nonprofit local and state news sites are proliferating. Some family newspaper owners are purchasing and investing in endangered small-town papers. A few billionaires have bought large metropolitan dailies. Some public radio stations, local television stations and even universities are getting into the act. Much of this is being seeded and nourished by philanthropic foundations and nonprofits.

American local newspapers had long depended on an economic model primarily supported by advertising and print subscriptions, both largely destroyed by the digital revolution. By contrast, the nascent revival of local news media is dependent on a variety of still evolving models. Here is a sampling of what is working and where.

Downie then catalogs the numerous examples of how private funding is underpinning this evolution. This is good news. It’s exactly how the market works, and a refreshing counterpoint to previous calls for a dangerous government bailout of local news. But the list contains a poison pill for press freedom, which is the subject of my posted comment:

I POSTED THIS COMMENT: 

Unfortunately, this otherwise hopeful accounting of the "evolving '' local news market in the digital age contains a dangerous element—the inclusion of government economic support as one element of the evolution. This is a dangerous equivocation, because government support is not market support, it is force. "[G]overnment support, so long as there are no strings attached" is a contradiction in terms. What about implicit strings? Once news outlets become hooked on political support, their independence and objectivity cannot be assumed. Government support is different in kind from the private methods of support highlighted throughout this article. It is the difference between force and voluntarism. And why should taxpayers be forced to support news outlets that they won't voluntarily patronize? The First Amendment reads "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press." I read that statement as establishing the complete separation of press and state, in the same way and for the same reasons as the opening line establishes the complete separation of religion and state. Keep the government at all levels out of the press. As this article makes clear, private market forces are fully suited to "saving" local news.

Related Reading:

The Pravda-ization of the American Press

New Jersey Civic Information Consortium’s Immoral Taxpayer Grab

Keep the press free from the academics and the politicians by Paul Mulshine

NJ Government Takes First Step to Becoming ‘the Sole Arbiter of Truth’

QUORA: ‘With the current worldwide heat crisis (July 2022), how can anyone doubt the reality of climate change?’

 QUORA: ‘With the current worldwide heat crisis (July 2022), how can anyone doubt the reality of climate change?’

I posted this answer, slightly edited:

Those who “see” climate change in this year’s summertime heat waves affecting some areas simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Heat waves no more prove the reality of climate change than religionists who “see” God in the heat waves (or any other weather events) proves the existence of God.

Of course, the Earth’s average global temperature is slowly warming. The warming, in turn, alters weather patterns in some areas, causing gradual, long-term shifts in some climates. But the mental linking of every news-worthy weather event to climate change is an indoctrination tactic geared toward a political agenda. An example of this tactic is Big Media’s coordinated world-wide, one-sided propaganda campaign, called the Covering Climate Now initiative. The purpose of this media cartel, dishonestly parading under the honorable label of “journalism,” is “a project . . . aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.” It’s a virtual given these days that any news report on extreme weather events will include “climate change” or “climate crisis” in the report, without any causal fact that links climate change to the event. Such a one-sided campaign ignores the genuine human catastrophe that would follow from the efforts to “fight climate change” by stifling economic growth and the reliable energy needed to power it.

As this question demonstrates, climate change has taken on faith-based, quasi-religious overtones. 

And it’s not only not helpful. It’s downright dangerous, because it leads people to support policies of energy deprivation that restricts peoples’ access to the reliable low-cost energy needed to protect themselves from heat and other weather extremes. Although some of these extremes may be marginally more intense, nothing currently happening in weather is unprecedented or anything resembling a “climate crisis.” In truth, what is not being recognized is the enormous human progress on commanding climate dangers that fossil fuels and freedom have enabled, and the danger the crusade against fossil fuels means to continuing progress, especially in light of the equally vociferous campaign against nuclear power. The issue is not “the reality of climate change,” which no one disputes. The question I would ask is “In light of this summer’s heat waves, how can anyone doubt the vital human necessity of reliable cost-effective energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power?”

I’ve posted other answers on this subject:

QUORA: ‘Why is there such strong pushback on climate change at the same time as we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?’

QUORA: ‘Why, even if the evidence is overwhelming, do many deny the risks our planet is running with climate change?’

QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

Related Reading:

Ida, the Catastrophist’s Latest Stopped-Clock ‘Prediction’

QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey

Norcross’ Message to Graduates: Shut Up and Submit to the Elites

When I came across a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column by George E. Norcross III, I perked up. The title is Norcross: You need a tough skin to be a responsible adult … and citizen | A 2022 commencement essay. I thought, great: Norcross’s message to college graduates would be an attack on cancel culture. 

Not so.

Instead, Norcross wants to strangle their expression by strangling their means of expression.

After admonitions to be treated like, and to act like, an adult, Norcross says

My advice to you is come into it with your eyes wide open to what our society is becoming — in New Jersey. In the United States and throughout the world. Being blunt — you need to have a thick skin because the culture we live in is increasingly unforgiving, even for minor errors — even for those who are just moving forward with their lives.

True. This is what we broadly call “cancel culture''. I’m not sure how much worse, if it is worse, our society has been in past eras compared to “what our society is becoming.” But it is horrible, especially since so many people are intellectually shallow, and allow themselves to be governed by emotion over reason. Of course, human culture has never been particularly forgiving. When has it not been good to have a thick skin? But at least Norcross is calling on young people to deal with it and fight back. Or at least I thought.

Why is it getting tougher out there? Maybe it’s because people are meaner, but I think there’s more to it than that. Social media platforms have made everyone a critic where there is no barrier to entry. It’s easy. It’s free. It’s immediate. And, it can be anonymous.

Yes. And that’s great. Social media has given the average person a platform from which to criticize powers-that-be, from politicians to mainstream media. More than that, people can advocate, express themselves, participate in national debates on the issues of the day, before wide audiences, like never before. Yes, some abuse that new-found power. But it is power—power to the ordinary person to call out politicians, big traditional media, and other prominent voices whose big megaphones allowed them to control the intellectual narratives. The free-wheeling intellectual discourse now open to untold millions of ordinary folks threatens that power of the elites.

And that’s what Norcross wants to stifle.

News organizations are held to a correctly high libel standard under the law. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Both as a subject of the media’s attention and as a publisher as I used to own The Philadelphia Inquirer. In let’s call it the mainstream media, it is very hard to attack with no basis when there is a libel standard.

But the protection isn’t there on today’s social media platforms. It’s a terrible mistake that Congress made in 1996 to exempt online platforms from liability based on content that people post on their sites. This must be corrected.

Social media platforms are not traditional newspapers. They are platforms, not publishers. Publishers are responsible for what they publish. On social media, the user is the publisher, not the company. What makes social media such free-wheeling free speech platforms is that the platform companies cannot be held liable for what the users—the actual publishers—say. And that’s how it should be. That’s justice.

Norcross says treat graduates like adults. But if social media loses its liability protection, it will be forced to police all content published by their users, for fear of being sued for what the supposed adults say. This will have the effect of stifling the free expression of ordinary folks, including the college graduates Norcross is addressing. “Why,” Norcross asks, “must this be corrected?” 

Because Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by not taking responsibility for the content posted on their sites are undermining democracy and making the lives of so many people truly miserable.

So freedom of expression, dissent, criticism, and public debate is “undermining democracy” if posted by ordinary people. What about those mainstream news organizations that Norcross sheds tears over? Have you ever seen the kind of viscous rubbage that they publish? And that’s fine, too. Just leave the rest of us the freedom to counter-speech.

Yes, ordinary people being able to express themselves is now easy, free, immediate, and, yes, anonymous. And that’s great. How in hell does that “undermine democracy?” True, it may undermine the political incumbents and mainstream media domination of the intellectual discourse. That’s great, too. And true, people post mean thoughtless stuff. Ignore it, or fight back with counterspeech--or libel lawsuits. Contrary to Norcross’s implication, social media publishers are subject to the same libel laws as traditional publishers.

Norcross laments that “Too often commencement addresses offer platitudes of leading a good life, seizing the opportunity and blah, blah, blah.” So what does he do? Worse. He uses his opportunity to push an anti-free speech political agenda, even citing former president Barack Obama’s call “for regulating these social media platforms to help save our democracy,” and which I critiqued as Obama's Disingenuous ‘Defense’ of the First Amendment. 

The 1996 law that Norcross deplores is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law shields internet companies who merely supply the platform for publishers from liability for what the users publish. That protection must be maintained if we are to protect the new-found freedom of expression average people now enjoy. That’s how you treat new college grads as adults. Let them express themselves -- and take responsibility for what they say. Don’t silence them. Leave them to be the tough skinned responsible adults and citizens you wish them to be.

To be fair, Norcross does finish with some sound advice. In the absence of social media regulation, he urges, take on “the responsibility to act as adults in a democratic society.”

You don’t need to agree with my political views or those of your friends. But… you do need to behave responsibly. Being critical of policies you oppose is the duty you have as citizens. 

That means you’re going to need to have tougher skin and at the same time understand the difference between news and vindictive personal attacks on these platforms.

You also need to distinguish real news on your feed. . .

Know, too, that you can’t be afraid of attacks. You will need a tough exterior to bat away anonymous criticism that your friends and family will see as well. Be a responsible citizen. Use social media as a form of connecting with people but don’t confuse that content for news.

I would be more blunt, and say what Norcross should have said. Don’t think about silencing people you disagree with by, for example, neutering Section 230. That's what the elites want. Instead, use your own internet freedom constructively. For those who might be tempted by Norcross’s and Obama’s calls for government involvement in this country’s intellectual discourse, I urge, “Instead, get off of your lazy mental ass and do the work of fact-checking, consulting of experts, considering of all opinions no matter how outrageous or offensive you may deem them, doing your own thinking, fighting back when necessary with your own counter-speech, and focussing on ideas.” 

That’s what “democracy”—or more precisely the democratic process in a constitutionally limited republic based on inalienable individual rights—actually demands. The government has no role in regulating the intellectual discourse of its citizens. Don't grant them that power.

Related Reading:

Obama's Disingenuous ‘Defense’ of the First Amendment

Trump Joins Biden in War on the Average Person’s Newfound Power to be Heard

Internet Free Markets and the false claim of Social Media Monopoly Power

Politicians Want to Destroy Section 230, the Internet's First Amendment: Four myths about the law that made the modern internet possible. -- ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN AND PAUL DETRICK for Reason

Social Media and the Future of Civil Society -- Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard

Many of the bureaucrats and commentators behind these laws and initiatives against social-media companies share essentially the same tactic. They blame social-media companies for not doing what governments are supposed to do—protect individual rights—and then rationalize that this supposed failure is grounds for doing what governments are not supposed to do—violate individual rights.

Eco/Climate Doom: The Miseducation, and Mental Abuse, of the Young

The climate hysteria peddled by the anti-industrial Environmentalists and the statists of the political Left has gone beyond debate over energy or a choice between untouched nature vs. industrial progress and human flourishing. The hysteria is causing real psychological harm to young people. A Nature study found:

The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.

The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

This unnecessary anxiety is causing real behavioral changes. In a propaganda-laced “news” article, CNBC reports that “A growing number of people are reluctant to bring a child into a world that’s set to be ravaged by climate change in the coming decades.” 

And it’s affecting people’s monetary choices, threatening their future financial security. The New York Times reports that, due largely to climate change fear, young people are saving less. One fearful individual said, “I’m not going to deprive myself some of the comforts of life now for a future that feels like it could be ripped away from me at any moment.”

This is the mental disaster that climate catastrophists have sown. And now young people are reaping the damage.

Psychologists coined a new term for this phenomenon—climate anxiety. This, in a period of history when human life has never never been safer from climate dangers and there has never been a more promising time in which to be a teenager. The present is amazingly good, and the future brighter than ever—unless the climate/environmental Chicken Little doomsayers manage to crush it. 

Despite the wholly unnecessary eco-anxiety (another term for it) being inflicted on the young, the climate catastrophists just keep piling on. In a Tampa Bay Times piece by Rose Wong, Climate change also affects mental health. Call it eco-anxiety, wrote:

Mental health professionals have a term for the stress and grief many feel about the planet’s future: eco-anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association defines it as “chronic fear of environmental doom.” It can lead to anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, from Rose Wong, the Times’s “mental health reporter”!  The sub-heading of Wong’s article reads, “Climate change doesn’t just threaten the planet. It also affects the mental health of those grappling with the consequences.” Can't this mental health reporter see that it's not climate change that is causing the young’s mental health problems? It’s the false "Climate change threatens the planet" Chicken Little catastrophizing that is causing the eco-anxiety she laments? Wong herself is part of the problem.

The title of this blog post is too mild. This is not mere miseducation. It is educational malpractice. More, it is child abuse. The constant barrage of environmental/ecological/climate doom mongering is causing real harm. The environmentalist/statist Left doom campaign must not be called out for what it is—a criminal conspiracy. It’s a campaign to frighten people, especially focussed on the young, into voting for the fascist political agenda of the Left. The conspiracy encompasses the political, education, media, and even the business fields. For some, it may be unintentional. But let’s be clear. Anyone who utters the term “climate crisis” or “save the planet” is guilty. This includes Rose Wong. 

Let’s also be clear about something else: panic mongering is wholly unnecessary. We can honestly acknowledge and deal with the negatives of climate change and other environmental problems without panicking the young into real mental health damage. Plenty of thinkers have documented and countered the false narrative being peddled that human flourishing is incompatible with successfully mitigating the challenges posed by economic and industrial progress to the climate or environment. The climate is not in crisis. The planet is not doomed. To the extent we encounter climate or environmental dangers, freedom, markets, Capitalism, science, and innovation is the answer. Not economic destruction; not political tyranny; not, as the U.N. asserts, a need to impose totalitarian top-down "unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society".

You don’t have to look too hard to get the whole truth. 

Related Reading:

My Quick Take on 'Opposing Views: Is Climate Change A Problem?'

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

Paris Climate Agreement Adopted: New Central Plan for the World’s Economy and Climate—Ronald Bailey for Reason.com

Is Climate Indoctrination Coming to NJ Government Schools?

The downside of doomism

The question of whether to seek political leverage by driving children to despair seems to be getting more and more negative answers these days. For instance Kelsey Piper, who as “a Staff Writer for Vox’s new vertical with a focus on the global poor, animal welfare, and risks affecting a stable future for our world” seems an unlikely candidate for a fit of sanity of any sort, just wrote:


“My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet. As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species. What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.”

Media Climate Change Propaganda “News” Rolls On

A recent Associated Press article posted by Martha Bellisle demonstrates how climate change propaganda can distort the facts to present a completely alternate “reality”.

Colorado’s late December 2021 wildfires that destroyed homes and neighborhoods have become the latest fodder for the Left’s quasi-religious climate agenda. In Climate change, new construction mean more ruinous fires, Bellisle “reports”

The winter grassland fire that blew up along Colorado’s Front Range was rare, experts say, but similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet — sucking the moisture out of plants — suburbs grow in fire-prone areas and people continue to spark destructive blazes.

I put “reports” in scare quotes because this article is really an opinion piece masquerading as news—or at the least a combination of news and opinion. First, note that the Colorado event was “rare”. Not unprecedented—none of the weather events suddenly blamed on climate change these days are unprecedented. This is true of the weather conditions that set up the fires. They were not unique. They’ve happened in the past, and will happen in the future. Yet climate change is blamed, implicitly and with no evidence whatsoever, for this fire event. This is a now-common refrain--to mindlessly label every weather event climate change. Note also that human activity—development in wildfire-prone areas and careless people—were the real reasons for the destructiveness of these fires. But the obligatory climate change has to be shoehorned in.

Next we see that “similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet.” “Will”, not may. That’s opinion, not fact. And how much more common? To date, despite decades of dire, hysterical predictions, extreme weather has not become more extreme to any significant extent, if at all. Yet . . . 

“These fires are different from most of the fires we’ve been seeing across the West, in the sense that they’re grass fires and they’re occurring in the winter,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. “Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change.”

The assertion that these fires “are going to continue to get worse” is, as I stated, pure speculation. The assertion that “we [can] stop climate change” is pure fantasy. Climate change is a regular, ongoing feature of Earth’s atmosphere, whether humans are a contributing cause or not. If “stop climate change” means stop human influence on the climate, what Overpeck is really advocating is to stop human progress and flourishing, and make man vastly more vulnerable to climate dangers, as people were before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—a genocidal “solution.” Where are the Associated Press fact checkers?

As Former Obama Administration science adviser Steven E. Koonan, IPCC independent Expert Reviewer and clean energy advocate Michael Shellenberger, and many other knowledgeable experts have shown, the observed facts simply do not support the view that wildfires, and weather extremes in general, are getting worse or more numerous globally. Or if they are, the change is marginal and in any event impossible to pin on a changing climate with any degree of certainty.

Note also that alternative solutions to the chimera of stopping climate change, such as what Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey discusses in depth, gets no coverage, despite the fact that the policies being advanced by political climate hacks to stop climate change would cause an unimaginable human catastrophe, which will be documented in energy expert Alex Epstein’s next book, that would dwarf that which would occur from any increase in extreme weather.

Bellisle and the Associated Press should be ashamed of themselves for advancing such sloppy journalism, blatant misinformation, and fake news.

Related Reading:

QUORA: ‘Why is there such strong pushback on climate change at the same time as we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?’

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels— by Alex Epstein 

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—by Ronald Bailey 

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us -- by Michael Shellenberger

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters – by Steven E. Koonin 

The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change—by Roger Pielke Jr. 

Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less—by Alex Epstein 

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet—by Bjorn Lomborg