“Government agencies are easily born, but they never seem to die. Rarely do they even fade away. But at 5 P.M. today the Government’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation closed its doors forever.”

– “U.S. Synthetic  Fuel Corporation Shuts Down,” New York Times, April 19, 1986, p. 46.

Only occasionally in U.S. energy history has a government energy agency disbanded. Almost all have been after wartime when bureaucracies were disbanded (such as World War II’s U.S. Petroleum Administration for War).

The demise of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation (SFC) in 1986 was a rarity. Established under the Energy Security Act of 1980, and called by President Jimmy Carter “the cornerstone of U.S. energy policy,” the SFC was premised on a belief in the increasing scarcity of crude oil and natural gas–and thus the need to turn coal into (synthetic) oil and gas.…

TRYING to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.

1 – Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications, well over a hundred years ago. Even in the late 1800s it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs for power. When we throw the switch, we expect that the lights will go on – 100% of the time. It’s not possible for wind energy, by itself, to EVER do this, which is one of the main reasons it was relegated to the archival collection of antiquated technologies (along with such other inadequate energy sources as horse and oxen power).…

“WHEREAS all the major productive provinces of the World have been identified with the help of advanced technology and growing geological knowledge, it being now evident that discovery reached a peak in the 1960s, despite technological progress and a diligent search … NOW IT IS PROPOSED THAT … No country shall produce [or import] oil at above its present depletion rate.”

– Colin J. Campbell (2003), reprinted here

MasterResource has been a home for mineral-resource optimism from such luminaries as Julian Simon, Pierre Desrochers, and Michael Lynch. Perhaps the most profound statement on this subject is from a University of Houston economics professor, Thomas Degregori, himself a student of Erich Zimmermann’s functional theory of resources, who stated in back in 1987:

If resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically.