“Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.” It ain’t so.

A recent op-ed piece praising carbon fees and credits shows that the author really does not believe what she writes. At best, carbon fees “nudge” producers, harming the economy while having little or no effect on “climate change.”

This is politics at its worst, mere show, positions unsupported by evidence, which don’t begin to solve the false problems they purport to address while allowing advocates to display “virtue” and look morally superior.

Her logic and evidence are likewise defective. The new UN Report’s “code red” assertions outrun and are contrary to its evidence, which is that climate change is less likely (than the last UN Report).

Read, by a real expert, Steven Koonin’s 2021 “Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters.”

Likewise, the writer’s insinuation that climate change is causing extreme weather events, is not supported by the evidence, including the UN Report. Three hot days in Oregon does not prove climate change. One swallow does not make a summer.

It is also economically illiterate to suggest to assert that such policies will be costless to poor and middle-class Americans. Taxes and fees are inevitably passed on to consumers.

Government, to enforce them, inevitably grows and grows (and costs). Indeed, as government grows, the administrative state imposes undemocratically ever more regulations, disincentives and costs.

Sadly, the writer is correct on one thing: much of this madness is bipartisan. Moderns lack respect for the golden goose of free market capitalism.

The Capital Press, issue after issue, case after case, shows the animus of the administrative state against producers: farmers, ranchers, miners, energy producers. The federal and state governments and agencies are engaged in warfare (lawfare) against producers. Ever-accumulating regulations kill business, especially farmers on short margins.

Unfortunately, uninformed voters elect, as in Portland, utopian politicians who believe that food comes from supermarkets, and energy from plugs, who don’t recognize that the energy revolution has transformed the world, and saved billions from poverty, starvation, war and slavery.

While still enjoying the benefits, they want to shut down farms, ranches, extractive industries and remove/prohibit dams, pipelines, transmission lines, refineries and all sources of energy (oil, gas, nuclear, hydro, coal).

A major American problem is the cancerous growth of the administrative state, of “experts” who rule in place of the people and their representatives, who tyrannically combine (against which Montesquieu warned) the three powers (legislative, executive, judiciary). Their “solutions” to “climate change” are “watermelon” solutions (green on the outside, red on the inside), which increasingly socialize and harm America and the West, while allowing China, India and other countries “their turn to pollute.”

Alan L. Gallagher

Canby, Ore.