“We build into our automobiles more power and greater gas consumption than we need. We use the press and radio to push the sales of more cars. We drive them hundreds of millions of miles a year in pursuit of futility.”
“With the exhaustion of our own oil wells in sight … much of our resource capital has been used up, but we still have our yacht, our stable of horses….”
– William Vogt. Road to Survival (New York: William Sloane, 1948), p. 68.
MasterResource documents the historical record behind the grand energy debate from the vantage points of business, economics, political economy, and history. What was said? When? Why? And to what effect?
One aspect of the debate has been the difference between natural market efficiency/conservation versus its political offshoot, conservationism, defined as the belief that less usage is per se a moral good or economic necessity.…
“The National Academy of Science reports are supposed to guide the thinking of policymakers …. One constant in both reports is the unwavering faith of energy experts in the efficacy of government-subsidized energy research and development, and government intervention in energy production markets. Looking back we can see that the Energy in Transition report from 1980 was largely a failure as an exercise in technical and economic prognostication.”
– Ronald Bailey, ‘How Green Is Your Crystal Ball?‘ (August 4, 2009).
The argument from authority (aka appeal to authority) is a favorite of climate alarmists/activists who are certain of a problem and its solution. But consensus-worshipping (intellectual bullying?) has been long employed by the Malthusian mainstream against those who do not see a massive market failure in the self-interested actions of humankind striving to be fruitful and consume in a free and prosperous commonwealth.…
…“Climate researchers … have a pretty good understanding of how the climate system works on average, but the reasons for small, long-term changes in climate system are still extremely uncertain.”
“The total amount of CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the last 100 years has upset the radiative energy budget of the Earth by only 1%. How the climate system responds to that small ‘poke’ is very uncertain. The IPCC says there will be strong warming, with cloud changes making the warming worse. I claim there will be weak warming, with cloud changes acting to reduce the influence of that 1% change.”
” … those of us who are skeptical of mankind’s influence on climate have a wide variety of views on the subject…. [I]t only takes one of us to be right for the IPCC’s anthropogenic global warming (AGW) house of cards to collapse.