Energy is ubiquitous to modern industrial life. It is the fourth factor of production in addition to the textbook triad of land, labor, and capital. Julian Simon coined the term master resource to describe the resource of resources, energy.
Energy as been recognized as a unique driver of economic activity and human betterment for almost two centuries–about as long as carbon-based energies came to be recognized as a sea change from the inherently dilute, unreliable renewable energies of before. The Industrial Revolution was enabled by coal, the energy required by the new machinery, as W. S. Jevons so brilliantly saw in his day.
The quotations below, some classic, resonate as well or better today than ever before. They are as ‘right” as the peak-oil quotations (compiled here and here) have been wrong.…
Continue Reading“Nothing is more fatal to a realistic and usable understanding of resources than the failure to differentiate between the constants of natural science and the relatives of social science, between the totality of the universe or of the planet earth … and … the ever-changing resources of a given group of people at a given time and place…. One has but to recall some of the most precious resources of our age—electricity, oil, nuclear energy—to see who is right, the exponent of the static school who insists that ‘resources are,’ or the defender of the dynamic, functional, operational school who insists that ‘resources become.’”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 11.
Resource optimists are continually rewarded by oil and gas drillers. One can only imagine what world production would be like if private property rights and profit/loss entrepreneurship were the norm as it is in much of the United States.…
Continue ReadingEditor note: This three-part series began with A Free Market Energy Vision (Part I: Worldview) and continued with Energy for a Free Society: The ‘American Energy Act’ (Part II: Real World Reform).
In their essay on energy policy for the 111th Congress, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the libertarian Cato Institute offered nine priorities to move the United States from energy statism to free energy markets.
But there are more areas of pro-private pro-market exchange reform on the federal level. I offer four–perhaps readers can add more in comments.
Nine Policy Recommendations (Cato)
Congress should: