Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. This 2008 essay by Bradley about Malthusianism, resourceship, and the ultimate resource surely qualifies. — Roger Donway, Managing Editor.

In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).…

“My aim is to finish projects to offer a comprehensive, reliable foundation for future energy scholars to expand and improve upon. Many specific episodes can be studied in greater depth, and future events will require analysis.”

This week is a birthday of note for me. Looking back at a half-century of interest in energy history and public policy, I thank my lucky stars and celebrate a worldview–classical liberalism–that has held up very well over time. It is not how smart you are; it is the ability to discern between a false narrative and objective reality. And with a reliable framework to understand the world, blue-collar research was the wide-open opportunity for me. I have never looked back.

My odyssey began with an Ayn Rand novel in high school on individualism. That got me to free-market economics in college.…

“Tomlinson is angry and sarcastic. His worldview is losing intellectually, politically, and business-wise. Is it time for him to retire and happily live off his spouse’s (ill-gotten) renewable energy riches?”

The “existential crisis” climate narrative is in meltdown. Houston solar leader John Berger has resigned, his 12-year-old company (Sunnova) positioned for bankruptcy. Other solar and wind stocks are tanking, and offshore wind is out of play. Battery and EV firms are regular restructuring news.

Climate activists find themselves out of taxpayer monies. The U.S. Department of Energy, Department of Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency are implementing President Trump’s “none-of-government” climate policy, reversing Podesta-Biden-Harris climate alarmism and the budget-busting Inflation Reduction Act.

But there is one fossil-fuel-despising business editorialist who is wed to the Climate Industrial Complex, not to mention a multi-millionaire renewables executive (thanks to your tax money).…

Ed. Note: Four years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.

It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences.

Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:

If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.”