“To the extent that the Gulf’s recapture of the dominant share of the global oil market will make price increases more likely, the U.S. economy is at risk…. Since 1970 sharp increases in the price of oil have always been followed by economic recessions in the United States.”
– Charles Curtis and Joseph Romm, “Mideast Oil Forever?” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1996.
“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”
– Joe Romm, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of the New York Times on Environmentalists and Scientists,” ThinkProgress, April 29, 2012.
Joe Romm, the climate-alarmist doyen of ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress), has long been subject to rebuttal at MasterResource.…
Continue Reading“The court’s naked bias against the use of rivers for hydroelectric projects is demonstrated by its words, ‘damage wrought by exploitation of the waterway.” Using this reasoning, it would be impossible to use any river for hydroelectric power.”
“Environmental organizations routinely oppose the construction of dams for hydroelectric power, i.e., clean renewable energy, while professing that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are an existential threat to mankind.”
“Such opposition against carbon-free capacity dwarfs, capacity-wise, support for wind and solar. How ironic, then, that the public policy program of the climate activists might be net CO2 positive.”
Back in 1992, a writer for Energy Daily [1] noticed something. “A strange thing happened to hydropower on its way to the sustainable energy ball: the party’s environmentalist hosts withdrew their invitation.” Daniel Kaplan continued:
… Continue ReadingLong a favorite of sustainable energy groups opposed to more traditional fuels … in the last 10 years environmentalists have turned on hydropower.
“WHEREAS all the major productive provinces of the World have been identified with the help of advanced technology and growing geological knowledge, it being now evident that discovery reached a peak in the 1960s, despite technological progress and a diligent search … NOW IT IS PROPOSED THAT … No country shall produce [or import] oil at above its present depletion rate.”
– Colin J. Campbell (2003), reprinted here
MasterResource has been a home for mineral-resource optimism from such luminaries as Julian Simon, Pierre Desrochers, and Michael Lynch. Perhaps the most profound statement on this subject is from a University of Houston economics professor, Thomas Degregori, himself a student of Erich Zimmermann’s functional theory of resources, who stated in back in 1987:
… Continue ReadingIf resources are not fixed but created, then the nature of the scarcity problem changes dramatically.