This reprint from a collection of essays at Julian Simon.com is published as an ode to Earth Day (tomorrow). This piece was finalized in Simon’s treatise, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), pp. 604–607. Simon’s relative politeness to his adversary is a tribute to open, honest, and respectful debate (versus the Paul R. Ehrlich approach).

“When you launch a space shuttle you don’t trot out the flat-earthers to be commentators. They’re outside the bounds of what ought to be discourse in the media. In the field of ecology, Simon is the absolute equivalent of the flat-earthers.” (Paul Ehrlich, quoted below)

For economy of treatment of the matter of attack rhetoric, let’s focus on just one critic, Paul Ehrlich, who has directed a great deal of colorful language in my direction (see also his comments in the Afternote to Chapter 15, and my interchange with him in Simon, 1990, Selection 43).…

“ERCOT asks residents, businesses to conserve electricity over potential lack of generating power … The April surprise served as a reminder to Texans that they’re not clear of the vulnerability that brought the state to a standstill in February.” So read a headline in the Dallas Morning News (April 13, 2021) This event led to the interview, below.

“Texas has reached the limit of our renewable dependence. There certainly should not be any more wind or solar for the grid…. [Renewables] are turning an energy-rich state into an energy-poor state.” (Bradley)

According to a report from America’s Power, through 2018, renewable energy resources — primarily wind and solar — have received subsidies amounting to more than $100 billion. (Fairley)

The Houston Republic—a source of fair reporting for conservative, libertarian, and classical-liberal views— recently published a piece in which I was featured.…

Make no mistake: The Great Texas Blackout debacle was a failure of government planning, not the free market.

Here are some quotations in the press about a massive coordination failure of nonintegrated entities, one that could have been avoided with ‘natural gas majors’ and ‘electricity majors’ –vertically and horizontally integrated–coordinating in-house.

Some quotations serving as background for this revisionist perspective follow:

“The failure of gas and electric companies to communicate with each other–again–demonstrates how, just as Texas’ power grid is a complex web of producers, transporters, deliverers and regulators, its near-collapse last month, too, was an integrated failure spread throughout the system.”

“At the height of the ‘snowpocalypse,” social media teemed with pictures of the power have and have nots–prompting outrage that vacant downtown office buildings had electricity they didn’t need while average citizens endured teeth-chattering cold or worse.”

“‘Unintended consequences of government intervention?’ Are you f***in’ kidding me? What just happened is a direct consequence of insufficient government intervention!” (Robert Borlick, energy consultant)

“No, with due respect. When the system loaded up on renewables, who would have known that low-to-negative marginal-cost pricing would have ruined the economics of baseload generators and natural gas peakers, existing and prospective. I was an adamant critic of windpower in the old days (1997) and just did not foresee this.” (Bradley, retort)

Many planners and regulators involved involved in the Great Texas Electricity Blackout have resigned or been fired. But their brethren, the experts behind the fallen PUCT/ERCOT model, are emotionally defending central planning and renewable energies by blaming the natural gas industry. “The CEOs of those gas companies should be criminally charged,” exclaims Robert Borlick, below).…