[Editor note: The posts in this series are The Great Energy Resource Debate (Part I: Peak Oil was … is here!) and The Great Energy Resource Debate (Part II: Neo-Malthusian Alarmism). Part IV will look at the theoretical case for resource expansionism in light of the preceding posts.]
Julian Simon has commented that the logic of expanding oil supply is a hard case to make–not because it is incorrect but because it flies in the face of the deeply ingrained physical-science concept of fixity and depletion. But there is no question that for too many minerals and for too many long periods of time, supply has been expanding rather than depleting in a business/economic sense. And far too many of us have ‘jumped off a tall building and reported everything was nice and breezy on the way down’ but haven’t hit bottom.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: Part I in this two-part series examined quotations on the primacy of energy for human betterment from friends of conventional energy and from neutral analysts.]
“When energy is scarce or expensive, people can suffer material deprivation and economic hardship.”
– John Holdren, 1991 (full citation below)
“A reliable and affordable supply of energy is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not.”
– John Holdren, 2000 (full citation below)
Free-market energy proponents gain the high ground when they stress the utilitarian nature of affordable, plentiful, reliable energy. Energy statists must play defense when their opponents stress the need to keep energy affordable for the less financially able and those billion-plus world citizens who do not have access to modern forms of energy.…
Continue ReadingEnergy 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.…
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