This national holiday weekend presents another opportunity to appreciate the labor-saving qualities of energy, the master resource. The utility of affordable, plentiful, reliable energy is not a partisan issue except to a fringe anti-industrial sect (see below).

Note how leading climate alarmists do not question the importance of energy for the masses. “A reliable and affordable supply of energy,” stated John Holdren, Obama’s two-term science advisor, “is absolutely critical to maintaining and expanding economic prosperity where such prosperity already exists and to creating it where it does not.” [1] The father of climate alarmism, James Hansen, has stated:

Let’s be clear: the frequent comparison of the fossil fuel and tobacco industries is nonsense. Fossil fuels are a valuable energy source that has done yeomen service for humankind. [2]

Energy as Bad?…

“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.…

“The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)” – David Appell to author, March 5, 2014

If temperament and dramatis personae matter, the climate alarmists lose resoundingly to their scientific critics. I have gotten to know the quite reasonable, friendly Roy Spencer, John Christy, Craig D. Idso, Richard Lindzen, and other leaders of the so-called climate realist, global lukewarming school. And Marlo Lewis et al. (CEI); James Taylor, Sterling Burnett, et al. (Heartland); Craig Rucker, Marc Morano, et al. at CFACT; and many more on the advocacy side.

All of “us” know the difference between straight analysis and advocacy versus ad hominem argumentation. Our side is polite … but tough on naked pleas for government authoritarianism or civil disruption by climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists.…

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…