“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language. In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.” – Fred Krupp (EDF), 2011.

Thirty something years apace, what can anti-CO2 activists claim for their efforts? Answer: not much, except for an incalculable amount of resources wasted to travel and politick around the globe.

Consider this bottom line. In 1988, the year the global warming alarm started, the global market share of carbon-based energies was 88 percent. Today, it is just a bit diminished at 85 percent. Total usage of natural gas, coal, and oil in this period increased by two-thirds, with CO₂ emissions rising 61 percent. Fossil fuels–dense, mineral energies–rock!

With this in mid, consider the article below from Greenwire (E&E News), dated April 5, 2011, by Colin Sullivan.…

“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.” (– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 203.)

“When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.” (- Robert Bradley, Jr. Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust, September 26, 2012.

How many times has it been stated that electric vehicles are ” a new technology.” Such was the thesis of a 2017 Think Progress article, “A Koch Front Group is Putting out Misleading Attack Ads on Electric Vehicles.”

If only journalists such as Samantha Page knew energy history.…

“The Petroleum Economist’s headline for 1998 projects, ‘Ever Greater Use of New Technology,” will also characterize future years, decades, centuries, and millennia under market conditions. If the ‘ultimate resource’ of human ingenuity is allowed free rein, energy in its many and changing forms will be more plentiful and affordable for future generations than it is now, although never ‘too cheap to meter’ as was once forecast for nuclear power.” (Bradley, 1999: 40)

From time to time, MasterResource dips into the history vault to demonstrate how well the free-market, human ingenuity worldview has stood the test of time. Julian Simon Lives!, in other words.

Twenty-one years ago, I published a Cato Policy Analysis, The Increasing Sustainability of Conventional Energy (No. 341: April 22, 1999). It was 51 pages with 250 references.…

This completes our two-part review (Part I here) of the development and worldview of Joanna Szurmak, whose work with Pierre Desrochers is at the forefront of classical-liberal scholarship in sustainable development.

Q. And the shorter pieces led to something bigger—a book, Population Bombed!

A. Yes. Since Julian Simon’s influence and inspiration was in our minds, in late 2017 we realized that Simon’s nemesis, Paul Ehrlich, was approaching the 50^th anniversary of his bestseller, The Population Bomb (1968). This slim book—really a collection of Ehrlich’s lecture notes that his wife and life-long collaborator Anne Ehrlich stitched together into a narrative—became a manifesto to population-control activists around the world.

Like Simon, we disagreed with both the premises and the arguments of those who Pierre likes to call the “population bombers.” But we had been noticing an upsurge in calls to impose controls on world population in the name of environmental health and climate justice.