Appreciating the Master Resource
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 2, 2024Energy is ubiquitous to modern industrial life. It is the fourth factor of production in addition to the textbook triad of land, labor, and capital. Julian Simon coined the term master resource to describe the resource of resources, energy.
Energy as been recognized as a unique driver of economic activity and human betterment for almost two centuries–about as long as carbon-based energies came to be recognized as a sea change from the inherently dilute, unreliable renewable energies of before. The Industrial Revolution was enabled by coal, the energy required by the new machinery, as W. S. Jevons so brilliantly saw in his day.
The quotations below, some classic, resonate as well or better today than ever before. They are as ‘right” as the peak-oil quotations (compiled here and here) have been wrong.…
Continue ReadingHappy, Energetic New Year from MasterResource
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 1, 2024
Whitewash on Display: Gaygate 2023, Climategate 2009
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 28, 2023“Gaygate 2023 and Climategate 2009 reinforce each other. So when will basic honesty and academic standards return to academia? To climate science?”
It’s a whitewash–again. The plagiarism (and data falsification?) of Harvard president Claudine Gay brings to mind the similar exposé of the Climategate emails, whose words, sentences, and paragraphs had to be swept under the rug back in 2009/2010 by an embarrassed establishment protecting its own. [1]
Wiki’s whitewash, for example, brought attention to the source (“denialists”) and then misrepresented the importance of the exposé.
… Continue ReadingThe story was first broken by climate-change denialists, who argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The CRU [Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia] rejected this, saying that the emails had been taken out of context.