“It is ironic that many environmentalists who would herald similar growth in population of some of the endangered species as a very good indicator of the environmental health of the planet, see the success of man as a harbinger of environmental doom. Even many economists usually consider an increase in production of steel or birth of an additional calf, as positive addition to the national output or Gross Domestic Product, but view the birth of a human child to have a negative impact on GDP.“

The twentieth Century has witnessed unprecedented demographic changes. For the first time in history, the world population almost quadrupled from about one and a half billion in 1900 to six billion in the span of just hundred years.  Likewise, Indian population too crossed the one billion level in May 2000, from about 238 million at the beginning of the Twentieth century.…

A culture war on college campuses today revolves around the politics of food production. In countless departments (history, sociology, anthropology, geography), and in so-called grievance (race, gender, class) programs, students are bombarded with the SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical) food narrative.

In an attempt to bring balance to the issue, Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto Mississauga  has developed a series of courses and reading seminars that take a broader perspective on the issue. He proceeds by discussing the economic and food safety and security concerns that led to the development of our globalized food supply chain.

Desrochers is author of the influential The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet and a featured contributor at MasterResource. His courses bring together insights about agriculture, business, economics, globalization, cities, and the environment.…

“The distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources is tenuous and perhaps in the last analysis untenable.”

– M. A. Adelman, The Economics of Petroleum Supply (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 66.

M. A. Adelman, profiled yesterday, was an empirically driven energy economist. He was not a Malthusian because the data suggested otherwise. He found with petroleum what Julian Simon found in the the family of mineral resources.

Adelman’s writings richly describe the way to understand the paradox of expanding depletable resources. He emphasized that oil was a fungible, global commodity, and improving knowledge can overcome diminishing returns in different regions and certainly globally.

And Adelman captured a point that Alex Epstein today stresses: that oil is not a ‘natural resource’ but a man-made one, from finding the treasure in the ground to refining the raw material into useful human products to transporting the inputs to delivering the outputs to points of human consumption.…

“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.…