Two planets are talking to each other. One looks like a beautiful blue marble and the other a dirty brown ball.

“What on earth happened to you?” the beautiful planet asks the brown one.

“I had Homo sapiens,” answers the brown planet.

“Don’t worry,” says the blue planet. “They don’t last long.”

Climate alarmism has turned into a big funny. The above, a joke at COP26 recalled by Thomas Friedman, says much about the stalled-out Church of Deep Ecology. It seems that enough governments are self-interested to slow down the march on road to serfdom–and a lot of Homo sapiens really care about energy affordability and reliability.

So much for the quixotic quest to substitute dilute, intermittent energies for dense mineral energies.

Of course, the energy intelligentsia refused to deal with that stubborn thing called Energy Density, opting for a blank check for wind, solar, and batteries.

“I realize lots of people don’t like government regulation, but the alternative is an out-of-control climate.” (A. Dessler: March 23, 2019)

Andrew Dessler, the climate alarmist’s alarmist and Michael Mann ally, is shifting from (highly uncertain) physical climate science to climate economics and policy analysis.

Dessler’s web page states:

My work has shifted towards the intersection of climate change and human society, with the goal of helping us better cope with the impacts of climate change. This includes work quantifying climate extremes and how climate change can alter them, as well as analyzing how climate change will stress crucial energy, water, and other infrastructure and human systems. This is a new area for me, so my ideas are still evolving.

Mark my words: this professor is eager to model the most extreme scenarios in his scare campaign.

Ed. note: MasterResource is closely associated with the worldview and example of Julian Simon (1932–1998). But a second influence would certainly be that of economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), born on this day 140 years ago.

Below, Robert Bidinotto’s “Von Mises: A Final Salute.” Unbound! Boston: Individuals for a Rational Society 2, no. 1 (September-October 1973): 1–2 is reprinted with permission of the author.

A surprisingly fair obituary in the New York Times (October 11, 1973) follows that of Bidinotto below. I then conclude with a final observation.

“The scope and content of von Mises’ work boggle the imagination. He was easily the greatest economist of this century, and the list of his original achievements in that science rivals that of anyone since Adam Smith.”

Our age may well be labeled by future historians as “the Age of Mediocrity.” Nothing is so characteristic of this century as the ever-shrinking stature of its men.

“[My] early writing was from a viewpoint that there was an ocean of BTUs beneath our feet, and what was high cost and supplemental today would become low cost and conventional later. I ‘trusted’ human ingenuity. I turned out ‘right’ for the wrong technological reason: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”

Any intellectual is interested in what is written about him or her, whether it be in the newspaper or an essay, book, or doctoral dissertation. In my case, being of 66 summers, and having a lot of scholarship under my belt, I do not worry much about the momentary ad hominem stuff. But for the record, I am eager to correct with facts and interpretation as needed.

This brings me to a dissertation, “Limits and Cornucopianism: A History of Neo-Liberal Environmental Thought, 1920–2007” (New York University: 2019).