MasterResource: 2Q-2011 Activity Report

MasterResource, a premier free-market energy blog, is two-and-a-half years old. Since beginning in late 2008, we have published approximately eight hundred posts from 100 authors. Our total views will exceed the magical one million mark in the current quarter. Comments from our loyal, sophisticated readership add substance to many of the in-depth posts.

This site has covered a variety of energy issues on the state, national, and even international level. But our most active area has been the growing backlash against industrial wind turbines. MasterResource is pleased to have become a leading voice for citizens, environmentalists, and small-government  advocates who have united against this intrusive, wildly uneconomic, and government-enabled energy form.

Our concept is different from most blogs. With one in-depth post per day, we have created an open book of mini-chapters, creating a scholarly resource and a historical record for the energy and energy/environmental debates. We now have more than 300 categories–the index of our ever expanding book. And we have achieved critical mass. Just Google an energy policy term and MasterResource–I bet something will come up!

Our content is for the future, not only the present. We are not shrill and are wed to energy reality, not energy postmodernism (this it, think it and it will happen). Future scholars will undoubtedly review MasterResource to understand the intellectual arguments and political discourse of the great energy debates of our time.

Major Themes

MasterResource has become the ‘go-to’ blog in a number of key areas:

• Resourceship, not “Peak Oil“. Our bloggers explain how and why the ultimate resource of human ingenuity in market settings allows the supply of ‘depletable’ resources to expand, not contract, even in the face of record usage.
• Sustainability. Our bloggers explain why government intervention in the name of ‘sustainability’ is the real threat to energy affordability, availability, and reliability. This is in marked contrast to the conventional view: that carbon-based energies are inherently ‘unsustainable’ due to some combination of pollution, depletion, and man-made climate change.
• Subsoil Privatization. Our bloggers explain why expanded reliance on capitalist institutions of private property, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law is the key to a better energy future for all, and particularly for the 1.4 billion who do not have access to modern forms of energy.
• Energy Density. As scholars from Vaclav Smil to Robert Bryce have documented, the best energies are the ones that can produce the most power at the least resource cost. The future belongs to the efficient, and oil, gas, and coal are the prime-time consumer-driven choices.
• Renewable Energy Realities. Our many bloggers from the front lines of the windpower debate, in particular, have documented how wind fails the cost, reliability, capacity, space, noise, and health tests. Taxpayer savings and deficit reduction, anyone?
• Fallacy of “Green Jobs“. Our bloggers have applied Economics 101 to explain how and why consumer-driven jobs are sustainable versus government-created bubble jobs.
• Climate Realism, not Alarmism. Chip Knappenberger has given MasterResource readers a reliable scientific voice on what the science does and does not say about the human influence on climate.
• Historical Understanding. Many of today’s energy debates are informed by often neglected studies and experience of the past. W. S. Jevons in his 1865 book, The Coal Question, basically refuted the notion that renewables could power the machine age. He also explained the paradox of how increasing energy efficiency can expand total energy usage, not decrease it.
• Spontaneous order. Outstanding developments in the industry that are ‘the result of human action but not of human design’ are highlighted, such as the oil and gas shale boom occurring in the United States and around the world.

Also, MasterResource keeps alive the memory of Julian Simon (1932–1998), the scholar who changed his mind about Malthusianism after reviewing the data and became a guiding light for realism and ensuing optimism.

How can MasterResource improve? Would you like to post with us? Comments welcome!

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Prior Activity Reports

1Q-2011 Report

4Q-2010 Report

3Q-2010 Report

2Q-2010 Report

1Q-2010 Report

4Q-2009 Report

3Q-2009 Report

2Q-2009 Report

1Q-2009 Report

Opening post/comments (December 26, 2008)