Expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be throwing good money after bad. Instead of remaining a valuable asset mired in the political swamp, the SPR can be turned into an entrepreneurial asset. The reserve can be privatized by selling off either the entire operation or its individual parts. – RLB (1991)

Good analysis passes the test of time. And since policy activism has a long history, the past is prologue. MasterResource has documented the false claims of energy Malthusianism in this regard.

The excerpt below, nearing a quarter-century of age, concerns the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), a forgotten, obsolete oil stockpile that could disappear tomorrow and hardly be noticed by the market. Created by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (one of many energy-crises laws), the SPR began operations in 1977.…

“[Climate] is not only a crisis—it is the most thorough and complete crisis our species and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we will survive intact.” – Bill McKibben (2020)

“[The fossil fuel industry] is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” – Bill McKibben (2012)

“Welcome to the Climate Crisis Newsletter,” featuring Bill McKibben, states the New Yorker. The new feature from the glassy-eyed, fringe fossil-fuel critic is the latest example of foregone scholarship and, in an election year, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The ultimate crisis? The end of civilization as we know it? Isn’t this what is under debate, with climate optimism a viable position given the protective role of wealth and abundant fossil fuels?

To McKibben and his mainstream media prop, it is all assumption, and false ones at that.…

“The Green New Deal is a massive investment program, not an expenditure. The question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what is the cost of inaction, and what will we do with our new shared prosperity created by the investments in the Green New Deal.”

“The Green New Deal sets a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, at the end of this 10-year plan because we aren’t sure that we will be able to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from farting cows or air travel before then.”

It was an embarrassment–and, to my knowledge, the most ill-conceived energy proposal in the history of the United States by a wing of a major political party since the oil-industry nationalization proposals of the shortage 1970s (yes, Bernie was part of that).…

“[T]he American Institutionalist economist Clarence Ayres explained the exponential growth or proliferation of technical devices in light of the fact that ‘the more devices there are, the greater is the number of potential combinations.’

New and better technology, in turn, meant that natural resources were really ‘materials’ that could become ever more abundant as ‘natural resources are defined by the prevailing technology’ rather than what nature had made available to humanity.”

– Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak, “Seven Billion Solutions Strong.” February 7, 2020.

Boom! Add economist Clarence Ayres to the other Institutional-school economists explaining how economic progress is open-ended, and how progress sets the stage for ever more.

Such helps to explain, for example, the paradox of expanding ‘depletable’ minerals.

Simon and ‘Schools’ of Economics

Julian Simon reversed his thinking to realize that more people meant more resources and progress, not less.…