“Big Government Democrats are not the cure to Big Government Republicanism. Oil, natural gas, and coal are middle class, working class energies. Wind and solar are for the rich…. Maybe, just maybe, these parasitic, inefficient energies will get the scrutiny they deserve from all sides of the political spectrum.”

The beginning of the Obama presidency was less than one month away. Things looked bad for energy. Climate exaggeration and alarmism as US policy was coming up. And there were very few of us in the free market camp to fight against climate/energy statism.

Eight years ago this month, I got in touch with these few–Marlo Lewis (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Ken Green (American Enterprise Institute), and Jerry Taylor (Cato Institute), and a few others–to launch a new website. Two-thousand one-hundred and twenty-seven posts later, we are into year nine of “a free market energy blog.”…

 “Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich[1]

Doom and gloom—and subsequent real-world falsification—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s beginning-to-end science advisor.

Halloween Holdren has been quiet about the outlandish in recent years because he does not want to embarrass his boss. But his many statements, beginning in the early 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh our memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!

Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…

“In the late 1970s, only three prominent energy experts continued to insist that oil prices would not rise inexorably and to display a contrariness to all efforts to dissuade them: Peter Odell of Erasmus University, the late Morry Adelman of MIT, and Arlon Tussing.” (Michael Lynch, below)

Several months ago, a giant of modern energy economics died at age 82. I belatedly sing his praises.

Arlon Tussing, author, co-author, or editor of an estimated 300 books and publications, influenced a generation of market-oriented energy economists. He also educated the energy industry by being realistic and blunt at a time when the conventional thinking was that ‘depleting’ resources meant that costs and prices had to go up.

Tussing analysis such as in his 1983 “An OPEC Obituary” (Public Interest) were spot-on, at a time when many voices were saying ‘Just Wait’ for Energy Crisis #3 (following #1’s Arab OPEC in 1973/74 and #2’s Iranian Revolution in 1979).…

“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (1979), p. 219.

Tomorrow (October 5, 2016), a book seminar will be held at Resources for the Future [register here] to revisit the lessons from the 1970s energy crisis. Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s by Meg Jacobs will receive comments from three RFF scholars.

The Princeton historian and author usefully provides a good deal of archival documentation surrounding the ill-fated attempt by federal authorities to regulate the price and allocation of crude oil and oil products in the 1971–1981 era. …