When I was director of public policy analysis at Enron in the late 1990s, I hired climatologist Gerald North of Texas A&M as a consultant to help me get to the bottom of the raging debate between climate ‘skeptics’ and ‘alarmists.’ I was Ken Lay’s speechwriter, and I was concerned that Enron’s embrace of climate alarmism (we had seven profit centers banking on priced CO2 from government intervention) was intellectually off base and thus violated the honesty plank of corporate responsibility.

It was money well spent. Dr. North was personable and honest, although he had a propensity to default toward alarmism if you did not challenge him. (Such is the neo-Malthusian propensity of most natural scientists who see nature as optimal and the human influence as only downside.) This is why I have called Dr.…

Ten years ago this month, a landmark book was published that put neo-Malthusianism on the defensive. The unvarnished facts were there to weaken doom-and-gloom prognostications, but it took a rare individual named Julian Simon (1932–1998)  ) to uncover the anomalies and present them in integrated and compelling form–and to win the most famous wager in the history of economics!

Then came a young Dane named Bjørn Lomborg set out to refute Simon but instead rediscovered the bogey of fixed-pie, depletionist thinking. This audacious 36-year-old also found that whether the result was of market progress or regulation, virtually all environmental indicators were trending positively, not negatively. Lomborg could agree with the title of Simon’s last major public address, “More People, Greater Wealth, Expanded Resources, Cleaner Environment.”

A Heated Debate

And then, with the debate joined, came a slew of establishment neo-Malthusians, led by John Holdren, now Obama’s science advisor, who got emotional and nit-picked.…

Previous posts at MasterResource have been critical of the energy-related positions of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, such as The U.S. Chamber’s Energy Security Index: Where’s the Definition? by Robert Michaels and Dear U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Why Attempt to Resuscitate a Brain Dead Climate Bill? by yours truly.

The Chamber, in fact, was waxed and waned for and against the free-and-neutral market for virtually its whole existence. Such is life in political capitalism where special government favor is sought and received by business.

John T. Flynn’s 1928 essay, “Business and the Government”   (Harper’s Monthly Magazine), criticized the Chamber motto More Business in Government and Less Government in Business as “sloganeering.”

Flynn noted that new laws were coming far less from the imaginations of legislators as from “the legislative program committees of trade associations or from the special counsel of trade groups … backed often by resolutions from trade conventions and chambers of commerce.”…

[Editor Note: This five-part series by Mr. Epstein, originally published in The Objective Standard, revisits the Standard Oil Trust controversy on this the 100th anniversary of the breakup of the Trust. Part I reviewed the flawed textbook interpretation of Rockefeller’s accomplishment; Part II sketched the rise of Standard Oil and defended the free-market practice of rebating.

The 1870s was a decade of gigantic growth for the Standard Oil Company. In 1870, it was refining fifteen hundred barrels per day—a huge amount for the time. By January 1871, it had achieved a 10 percent market share, making it the largest player in the industry. By 1873, it had one-third of the market share, was refining ten thousand barrels a day and had acquired twenty-one of the twenty-six other firms in Cleveland.…