“We are old climate veterans who have tried to do our part, in every way we know how, to keep our fossil-fuel addicted civilization from driving off a cliff. Are we tired? Sure. Discouraged? Absolutely. Pissed off? Yep. Sad? Call it broken-hearted.”

– Kathleen Dean Moore and SueEllen Campbell, Why We Won’t Quite the Climate Fight, Earth Island Journal, January 28, 2019.

“The admittedly ‘tired … discouraged … pissed off … broken-hearted’ deep ecologists can either live in gloom and despair or check their premises to entertain happiness…. Don’t quit–study. Consider Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 for starters. And live joyfully.” (below)

It is a fossil-fuel world for as far as the eye can see. Abundant, affordable, and reliable, mineral energies are the ones that consumers voluntarily purchase.…

“The Industrial Revolution did not cause hunger, poverty and child labor. Those were always with us. The Industrial Revolution helped to eliminate them.”

Recently, Tupy penned his thoughts about the importance of energy to human advancement—and mineral energies to energy. His 1,500-word post follows in its entirety.

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What is the role of the Industrial Revolution in general and fossil fuels in particular in bringing human improvement? Those readers who are familiar with Alex Epstein’s excellent The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels will recognize the gist of my argument: fossil fuels, which drive, among other things, modern agriculture and industrial production, make present-day abundance possible.…

“Bitter conflicts over wage differentials, a hodgepodge of subdivisional judgments regarding the proper price of coal, blatant disregard for the code proscription against selling under a fair market price, and the widespread disregard of the other injunctions against unfair trade practices produced a chaotic price structure….”

“Each price classification included several individual pries based upon the physical structure, chemical analysis, and use-value of a specific type of coal, thus generating a number of prices–at least 400,000–far beyond the ability of a decentralized code to administer.”

“The fragile structure of the coal code buckled under the weight of inordinate administrative complexity and the persistent assaults of critics within and without the industry.”

 – John Clark, Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946. University of Illinois Press: 1987,  pp. 266–27.

“I hope that next time you hear people complain about the terrible state of human affairs, you’ll ask them in what other period in human history do they think they would be better off. If they get the point of the question, good. If they don’t, they should sign up to receive our scintillating newsletters. Pronto.” (Marian Tupy, below)

MasterResource is inspired by the work, worldview, and personal example of Julian Simon (1932–1998). The leading expositor of the Simon worldview today is Marian L. Tupy, the intellectual entrepreneur and scholar behind the Cato Institute project, HumanProgess.org.

It is with pleasure that we share with our readers the year-end message from Tupy at HumanProgress.

Your favorite website has had a successful year. In July, we experienced our heaviest traffic yet, with 230,000 page views and 122,000 unique visitors.…