“Many of the writers about ‘peak oil’ have moved on to ‘peak everything’ (Richard Heinberg) and ‘peak food’ (Paul Roberts). They apply the same flawed model that treats resources as static and ignores investment and innovation. This is especially telling since the model has failed so abysmally in the case of food and famine, as the record of Paul Ehrlich and his followers has shown.”

In his excellent book, Future Babble, Dan Gardner demonstrates empirically that the neo-Malthusians who have plagued us for the past half century have not only been egregiously wrong in their predictions; they have tended to insist that they were, in fact, correct, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. They accomplish this primarily by selective memory, such as greatly understating their original claims, or treating minor, regular difficulties (such as local famines) as confirmation of their apocalyptic visions.…

[Editor note: From time to time, MasterResource will publish excerpts from Bradley’s forthcoming book, Political Enron: A Business History, (John Wiley & Sons and Scrivener Publishing, 2016). The first two volumes of his trilogy on political capitalism, inspired by the rise and fall of Enron, are on worldview (2009) and industry background (2011).]

Enron’s two-front civil war within the fossil-fuel industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s had natural gas warring against coal on the one side and petroleum on the other. But Ken Lay’s well researched, ably orchestrated effort inspired another split, this one within the hitherto anti-fossil-fuel, anti-industrial environmental community.

“Natural gas has, until recently, tended to be lumped in with the ‘bad guys,'” wrote natural gas scribe Daniel Macey. “Now the question is whether to let natural gas into the environmental camp.”…

[Editor note: Political capitalism, aka crony capitalism, is a major theme at MasterResource because special government favor enables three major energies: ethanol, wind power, and on-grid solar power. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist-leaning historian, popularized the term political capitalism — and concluded, with few exceptions, that business led government, rather than government (reformers) led industry, into interventionism. Kolko overstated his case, however, as this post contends, misleading free-market proponents of Kolko and political capitalism.]

“Bradley and Donway closely analyze Gabriel Kolko’s contention that nineteenth-century railroad officials sought regulation, identifying mistaken notions about private property and capitalism, as well as Kolko’s uncritical reliance on railroad statements that were coerced by the threat of legislation, weak citations, and misquotes.”

We can thank New Left historian Gabriel Kolko for the modern concept of “political capitalism” and its offspring, “regulatory capture.”…

[Editor’s note: This post from 2011 is relevant today as the Losing Left tries to impugn the motives of the free-market climate/energy realists, one target being climatologist David Legates, recently profiled at MasterResource.

David Appell, part of the controversy back in 2011, in fact, reared his head again in the comments section recently at MasterResource. An active climate alarmist with very strong opinions, he hardly rebuted his rebutters. Science is supposed to be his thing; if he would like to answer for Gina McCarthy and US EPA here, he will be given the floor.]

The public editor at the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, recently wrote in his weekly Public Editor column about the trustworthiness of Robert Bryce, the nation’s leading energy journalist who has graduated to being a top energy public policy scholar, period.…