Ed. Note: For posts at MasterResource on the comments of Julian Simon award recipients, see the appendix below.

This past February marked 25 years since my father’s death.  In 2001, CEI began awarding the Julian Simon Memorial Award. My family deeply appreciates not only that CEI established this award, but also that CEI now has continued this award for 23 years.

The first award went to my father’s long-time collaborator, Stephen Moore. Steve, by the way, now leads the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. I hope you all subscribe to the Committee’s excellent and free Hotline.

This year’s award recipients, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, began working together a few years ago on a very ambitious project that last year reached an apex with the publication of their book, Superabundance.…

“Halloween is coming October 31st; there is no reason to normalize scares for the rest of the year.”

It is good to see David Simon in the climate sustainability debate. The son of Julian Simon (1932–1998), David is a clear voice contrasting hypothetical doom against real statistics. And it comes in the very year that John Holdren, former Obama science advisor and bitter foe of Julian, predicted as many as one billion climate deaths could occur.

MasterResource has previously highlighted David, a Chicago attorney writing as a fellow of the Washington-based Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Simon’s op-ed, “Paul Krugman Is a Global Warming Alarmist. Don’t Be Like Him” (January 16, 2020), had a zinger in the first of his six major points.

First, the earth’s temperature has been rising at a microscopically slow pace. NASA’s

Julian Simon (1932–1998) died 22 years ago this week, just short of his 66th birthday, too young by today’s standards. But Simon Lives! moments are common, with the most recent being the President of the United States telling the world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“[W]e must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers — and I have them and you have them, and we all have them, and they want to see us do badly…. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the ’70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s. These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform, and control every aspect of our lives.”

Ed. Note: Jane Shaw Stroup blogs at two websites: Jane Takes On History and Liberty and Ecology Blog. The post below can be accessed here.

Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.

Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.

Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr.…