“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”

     – Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.

“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”

    —Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]

I know…. We free-market optimists–and we ObamaCare, ObamaEnergy, etc. pessimists–are like the chap who jumps off the skyscraper and reports that everything is breezy on the way down.

But we have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798.…

“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need to be employed in dissuading them from it.”

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1)

We all know that Google is incredibly future-oriented, and that, for all its problems, Microsoft, knows a lot about technology and markets. Why, then, did each shockthe ‘smart grid’ movement by announcing the phaseout of their home energy metering and control technologies (Microsoft’s Hohm and Google’s EnergyMeter)?

The deep meaning of this is less about technology than it is about politics.

Two PR Moments

You will learn nothing from the announcements from Google and Microsoft. Both companies’ PR departments broke the news as sanctimoniously as possible, using the language of planetary consciousness.…

MasterResource, the free market energy blog, surpassed a million views last month. While not a megablog by any means, ours is a high quality, in-depth, one-post-per-day contribution to the current energy debate–and a resource for the historical record (our extensive index stands at 365).

Since its beginning in late 2008, MasterResource has published approximately 875 posts from 110 different authors. Comments from our loyal, sophisticated readership add substance to many of the in-depth posts. And we have achieved critical mass; Google an energy-policy-related term and MasterResource, and usually something will come up.

MasterResource has covered a variety of energy issues on the state, federal, and even international level. But our most active area has been the growing backlash against industrial wind turbines. MasterResource is a leading voice for citizens, environmentalists, and small-government  advocates who have united against this intrusive, wildly uneconomic, government-enabled energy form.…