A Free-Market Energy Blog

The Argument for Adaptation and Resilience (Part I: Theory)

By Terry Anderson and Donald Leal -- July 14, 2025

Editor’s Note: A classic post at MasterResource from a decade ago concerns the most important weather/climate strategy in a new political era. Written by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal of the Property and Environment Research Center, the post explains how humankind successfully meets challenges with adaptation rather than top-down government edicts.

Rather than simply throwing up our hands in despair with respect to what appear to be intractable problems of establishing property rights and encouraging markets in regard to global climate, we turn to a major theme of free-market environmentalism—dynamic markets provide the best hope for human interaction with dynamic environments.

Once we abandon static models of market equilibrium and recognize that people respond to changing environmental conditions (e.g., experiencing rising sea levels), as well as resource prices that reflect those conditions (e.g.,…

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Mining the Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 11, 2025

“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”

In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).

Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…

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NOAA’s 2020 Prediction Bust: “U. S. Winter Outlook: Cooler North, Warmer South”

By -- July 10, 2025

Editor’s Note: With the current debate to downsize and reorganize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Department of Commerce), the repost below documents the fact that NOAA not only provides information but misinformation based on climate models and attribution studies. The example concerns the Texas winter of 2020–2021 and Storm Uri that blacked out most of Texas.

“NOAA’s timely and accurate seasonal outlooks and short-term forecasts are the result of improved satellite observations, more detailed computer forecast modeling, and expanding supercomputing capacity,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., acting NOAA administrator. (below)

Cold extremes decrease and warm extremes increase in a warmer world, and cold extremes tend to be more sensitive to global warming than the warm ones. (emphasis added) Science Bulletin, below

Humility in the face of unknowns is a worthy attribute.…

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Power Density: The Key

By Kent Hawkins -- July 9, 2025
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Energy: The Master Resource (by Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 8, 2025
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Energy & Environmental Review: July 7, 2025

By -- July 7, 2025
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Adam Smith’s Insight for Independence Day 2025 (Part II)

By Richard Ebeling -- July 4, 2025
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Adam Smith’s Insight for Independence Day 2025 (Part I)

By Richard Ebeling -- July 3, 2025
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The First Solar Power Plant: 1916

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 2, 2025
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Competitive Solar? A Perennial Deceit (Enron/NYT in 1994)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 1, 2025
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