[Editor note: The original title of the post of Dr. Brätland (bio at end) was “Institutions and Policies that Impede Capital Maintenance for Extractive Firms.” Resourceship is a term used by the late economist Stephen McDonald (1924–2006) to describe entrepreneurship applied to mineral resources.

Dr. Brätland’s post below complements a series of entries at MasterResource under the terms resourceship, peak oil (fixity-depletion), and ultimate resource, as well as subsoil privatization.]

Although capital maintenance by extractive firms refutes the exhaustion myth of minerals, this refutation hinges on access to lands, entrepreneurial latitude in managing resources, and secure private-property rights.

In particular, certain institutions of governmental control and jurisprudence hinder entrepreneurial actions of extractive firms striving to maintain capital (defined as the asset value of to-be-extracted minerals).

These hindrances include:

(a) Foreclosure of land access by government ownership of mineral lands;

(b) Foreclosure of entrepreneurial latitude by court imposed covenants enforcing obligations to surface owners; and

(c) In the case of petroleum, the extractive firm’s inability to acquire full control and ownership of reservoirs it has discovered.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his policies would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket” and “bankrupt” any company trying to build a coal-fired generating plant. This is one promise he and his über-regulators are keeping.

President Obama energetically promotes wind and solar projects that require millions of acres of land and billions of dollars in subsidies to generate expensive, intermittent electricity and create (really centrally plan) jobs that cost taxpayers upwards of $220,000 apiece – most of them in China.

His Interior Department is locking up more coal and petroleum prospects, via “wild lands” and other designations, and dragging its feet on issuing leases and drilling permits.

Meanwhile, his Environmental Protection Agency is challenging shale gas drilling and fracking, and imposing draconian carbon dioxide (CO2) emission rules, now that Congress and voters have rejected cap-tax-and-trade.…

March Hare (to Alice): Have some wine.

(Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.)

Alice: I don’t see any wine.

March Hare: There isn’t any.

Alice: Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it.

March Hare: It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.

— From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Energy journalist Robert Bryce in Power Hungry foretells an electricity future anchored by natural gas that will bridge the transition to nuclear power. With his third book in less than a decade, Bryce is now a leading light of the energy policy debate, appearing regularly on op-ed pages and on news shows.

Bryce recently participated in two debates. In one hosted by The Economist, he argued for the proposition that “natural gas will do more than renewables to limit the world’s carbon emissions.”…

On occasion, I have the opportunity to assist Dr. Patrick J. Michaels (Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute) in reviewing the latest scientific research on climate change. When we happen upon findings in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press, Pat sometimes covers them over at the “Current Wisdom” section of the Cato@Liberty blog site.

His latest posting there highlights research findings that show that extreme weather events during last summer and the previous two winters can be fully explained by natural climate variability—and that “global warming” need not (and should not) be invoked.

This topic—whether or not weather extremes (or at least some portion of them) can be attributed to anthropogenic global warming (or, as Dr.…