“In the current energy debate, the diligent amateurs are often the real pros, and too many ‘pros’ are amateurish.”

MasterResource continues apace as a movement-wide voice of free market energy scholarship. Nearly 150 different authors have been featured at our site since its inception in late 2008. Total views have surpassed 1.3 million, with many visits by those searching on a topic relevant to past posts.

MasterResource is rated a top 30 (of 10,000) “green blog,” and a “Top 100” Science blog, according to Technorati.

With 435 categories in our extensive index, MasterResource is a research tool, not only a timely contribution to energy scholarship and current political debates. We are Google friendly with many energy terms (try one with ‘masterresource’).

I have lauded our ‘talented amateurs’ in previous activity reports.…

“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…

Energy efficiency and energy savings are considered to be intrinsically good. Politicians of all stripes sing the praises of less-is-more. Only one problem: this view is simplistic and wrong from the economic point of view.

Energy efficiency is so central to the current energy conversation that to criticize it is to take on the unenviable role of the contrarian or, as some have called me, the curmudgeon. In a recent paper, Roy Cordato of the John Locke Foundation happily takes on the role of critic as he dissects energy efficiency as a policy goal.

Dr. Cordato states in part:

It seems that no matter what governments at any level do, from building buildings to formulating and implementing legislation, “energy efficiency” has to be a consideration…. The problem is that the term, as defined by those who embrace it as a policy guide, is focused strictly on saving energy even if it means sacrificing overall economic efficiency.

The American Energy Alliance (AEA) and the Institute for Energy Research (IER) have created a new platform, American Products. American Power. to educate the nation about the critical role that energy plays for our economy and in our daily lives.

IER is an educational non-profit under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code; AEA is an advocacy non-profit under Section 501(c)(4) of the code.  I am founder and CEO of IER.

Here is the website’s introduction to the new initiative:

Welcome to American Products. American Power. If you shaved today, brushed your teeth, or are reading this on a computer, you already know us.

You also probably know that energy makes it possible to heat our homes, cook our food, and fill our gas tanks, but it does much more. Energy protects our troops and keeps our firefighters and police officers safe.