California Energy Policy: Elitist, Import-dependent, and a Tax on the Rest of Us

By -- May 1, 2014 7 Comments

“Can we really afford to adopt California’s policies, laws and regulations in the rest of America, and then throughout the world? For that matter, how much longer can the once Golden State afford to inflict those policies on its own citizens?”

When George Washington was stricken with malaria and a throat infection in 1799, his physicians used leaches to bleed a quart of blood and remove “morbid matter” from his weakened body. Next they administered laxatives and emetics. A few hours later, Washington died.

This cure worse than the disease finds close parallels in California’s energy and environmental policy. This is the state that leaches energy from its neighbors, and that President Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency often view as their public policy standard bearer. But these energy “physicians” are threatening our nation’s lifeblood.

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“Happy Earth Day” (Julian Simon 25th anniversary essay speaks to us today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 22, 2014 5 Comments

“[It] is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is every scientific reason to be joyful about the trends in the condition of the Earth, and hopeful for humanity’s future, even if we are falsely told the outlook is grim. So Happy Earth Day.”

[Editor note: This post reprints the Earth Day 1995 essay of Julian Simon, “Earth Day: Spiritually Uplifting, Intellectually Debased.” Posts about the ideas of Simon (1932–1997), an inspiration to this blog, can be found here]

April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.

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Solar Land Blues: The Eco Reality of Dilute Energy

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 7, 2014 No Comments

“As citizens, we need to call on our leaders to make thoughtful choices about where to site industrial-scale development and renewable energy projects, and to create a legacy for our national parks and to public lands everywhere.” – Mark Butler, “Saving the Mojave from the Solar Threat,” Los Angeles Times , March 25, 2014. “‘Soft’ energy sources are horribly land intensive…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.” – Peter Huber, Hard Green; Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 107–108.

Hard-green energies (fossil fuels, uranium) have a major ecological advantage over politically-correct soft energy (wind, solar): less infrastructure requirement, including land. 

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Right on Green: In Search of Authentic Free-market Environmentalism (Book review, ‘Responsibility & Resilience: What the Environment Means to Conservatives’)

By Josiah Neeley -- April 4, 2014 2 Comments

“Conservative Me Too-ism is well represented in Responsibility & Resilience, at times almost to the point of tedium. The two American politicians with entries in the volume – former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg – are not exactly known as movement conservatives. And their entries do not disappoint.”

For many people, “conservative environmentalism” sounds oxymoronic. Since the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s, the Left has mostly managed to claim the moral high ground. They get to be for clean air, clean water, and saving the whales; for harmony with nature; and against pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and other bad things.

In response, conservatives have often let themselves be cast as the heavy in the Left’s morality tale, stuck talking about cost-benefit analyses and questioning whether low level exposure to some unpronounceable chemical compound is really so bad.

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Human Achievement Hour: Lights On!

By William Yeatman -- March 28, 2014 1 Comment Continue Reading

TexasWorld: Freedom, Room for All (a mental experiment)

By Greg Rehmke -- March 21, 2014 2 Comments Continue Reading

Julian Simon’s ‘The Ultimate Resource’ (1981) Speaks to Us Today

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 12, 2014 9 Comments Continue Reading

The Not Given State of the Union Address (Freedom 101 over ‘the road to serfdom’)

By Richard Ebeling -- January 29, 2014 1 Comment Continue Reading

MasterResource Turns Five

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 26, 2013 6 Comments Continue Reading

“Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability” Revisited: Part II

By Sandy Liddy Bourne -- November 27, 2013 No Comments Continue Reading