This Saturday is the third annual, 2009 edition of the Earth Hour campaign to turn off the lights for one hour to bring attention to the alleged crisis of global climate change. The organizer, the World Wide Fund for Nature, states:

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

Here is a better idea: leave the lights on in observation of Human Achievement Hour as suggested by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.…

[Note: Sunday posts at MasterResource will include best-of reposts from this blog, best-of posts or op-ed’s from other writers, and other general material.]

Robert Bryce is a straight shooter and exactly the type intellectual that is needed as a rethink slowly emerges from the current politicized energy fare.  He himself has changed his mind on vital issues, just as Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg did before him. Indeed, as Bryce mentions in the op-ed to follow:…

Paul Ehrlich treated his intellectual rival Julian Simon with great disrespect during Simon’s lifetime. Ehrlich refused to debate Simon or even meet him in person. He insulted Simon in print. Ehrlich even scolded Science magazine for publishing Simon’s 1980 breakthrough essay “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of Bad News,” with the words: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off this shoes to count to 20?” (quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource II, 1996, p. 612)

Such intolerance for reasoned dissent, unfortunately, has also been a trait of Ehrlich protégé John Holdren. After I published my review of John Holdren’s criticism of Bjorn Lomborg in 2003, I emailed  Holdren my paper, “The Heated Energy Debate,” and alerted him to a new book I had coming out, Climate Alarmism Reconsidered.…

Physical scientists are prone to viewing hydrocarbons as a fixed quantity. Being fixed, this volume must deplete with production. Extraction costs and thus selling prices must rise. The crisis is only a matter of when [“What will we do when the pumps run dry?” asked Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich in 1974 (The End of Affluence (p. 49)] . Physicist John Holdren is no exception to this view.

Reality is quite different from the hard science formulation, however. In a business or economic sense, mineral resources are not fixed, known, or depleting. They are created by entrepreneurship (“resourceship”) in a market economy where incentives are present and technology improves. Mineral quantities can and do expand over time as shown by time-series data of estimated world resources.…