In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
“… fossil fuels replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labor-saving tools. Since then, cheap oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, and even our concept of happiness. Many North Americans today live as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation owners. We feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Greystone Books, 2012), book synopsis.
“The evolution of fracking technology would not have surprised Jacques Ellul. In his final book on the subject, The Technological Bluff, the Christian philosopher argued that the rapid adoption of techniques from computers to genetic engineering generates totalitarian discourses.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk. Slick Water: Fracking (Greystone Books, 2015), p. 309.
Here at MasterResource, opposing views are considered thoroughly.…
“Michael Shellenberger needs to go Alex Epstein. He must explain the fundamental energy concepts of density and intermittency in his political quest in the Golden State…. He must differentiate between global lukewarming and catastrophic warming from the enhanced greenhouse effect. The war on fossil fuels must end in California.”
Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress, is running for Governor of California. Energy is his major campaign issue for a state that is in energy trouble. But he must properly finish what he has started–even to the point of speaking political incorrectness to power.
“I am a lifelong Democrat and have worked for progressive causes all of my life.” So begins the “About” section of Michael Shellenberger’s website for his run for California’s governorship. A resident of Berkeley, he touts his credentials as a Progressive Democrat:
In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
Editor Note: This completes a two-part interview of Professor Jack High, profiled yesterday. His interest in business scholarship in the classical-liberal tradition relates to important topics at MasterResource: political capitalism, contra-capitalism, and corporate cronyism.
“There is so much about business practice that is ripe for study by Austrian economics, but it is not a main focus of our present generation of scholars….. I suspect that the study of business practice is an opportunity for enterprising Austrian scholars to make a mark.” (Jack High, below)
Part III: Austrian Economics and Business History
Q. Let’s step back and talk about business history. How did Austrian (or market process) economics overlap with the study of business?
A. Austrian economics from the beginning has realized that market activity is characterized by desire for improvement, and that change is initiated and carried out by the vital few, to use Jonathon Hughes’ term.…