“And, frankly, libertarians like you who have supported Trump bear blame for this crap too. You have NO ground to stand on today having enabled this seditious shitty excuse for a human being….” (Steve Horwitz to Rob Bradley, Facebook, January 6, 2021)
“For me, one of the most tragic results of the Trump phenomenon has been to cause good, decent, reasonable classical liberals (libertarians, the good ones, not the zealots, you know what I mean) to yell at each other in anger and frustration.” (Peter Lewin, Facebook, January 8, 2021)
Amid the Capitol violence of Wednesday January 6, Peter Lewin, a notable Austrian-school economist and respected classical liberal, posted on Facebook about the “out of control zealots…. Mob Hysteria ready to explode….” Exchanges followed. I asked some rather civil questions including this one:
…I’m not condoning the violence, just trying to put it in perspective…..
“Is the human environment better because of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the usage of carbon-based energies? The answer is a resounding yes. That is triumphant news, whether the human influence on climate is net ‘bad’ or net ‘good’ by a physical, stasis metric.”
Statistics and history matter. Particularly when a shared narrative is contradicted by the interaction of man and nature.
A recent Facebook post by Bjørn Lomborg cannot be emphasized enough in this regard. Over the last century, climate-related deaths have plummeted as societal wealth has overcome the limits to nature. I am reminded of an Alex Epstein quotation, mirroring a major theme of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels:
…Nature doesn’t give us a stable, safe climate that we make dangerous. It gives us an ever-changing, dangerous climate that we need to make safe.
“Soon enough, citizens and voters will wise up to the false promises and cronyism of political energy. MasterResource will be an intellectual resource to help win the day for the master resource and the human ingenuity behind it.”
There is life outside of energy research and related public policy. I discovered some of it during the last ten days with limited responsibilities on the avocation/vocation front. But it is time to re-engage–and take time to look back and forward.
A Look Back
MasterResource, “a free market energy blog,” just turned twelve years old. In our inaugural post (December 26, 2008), I wrote:
…We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items.