“What many environmentalists seem incapable of understanding is that resources are created. After all, crude oil is just sludge until you get it out of the ground and figure out how to use it as an energy source.”

“This Earth Day, we should all give two green thumbs up for human freedom and innovation.”

There is a certain fringe of the environmentalist movement whose members have almost nothing good to say about their fellow men and women. If not for humans, they sometimes explicitly argue, the Earth would be a wonderful place. The lion might not lie down with the lamb, but at least “nature” would be allowed to run its course unobstructed by humankind—which in their reckoning is somehow not a part of nature.

Admittedly, humans have a particular nature that sets them apart from the rest of the fauna on this planet.

MasterResource was founded in late 2008 as a “free market energy blog.” Several thousand posts from 300 contributors later, our niche includes:

• The historical background of energy/energy policy to complement current discussions
• The economic and ecological problems of industrial wind turbines and solar arrays, with reporting from the grassroots
• Assessment of major players and important events in current energy debates for posterity

The online energy space has become very crowded in recent years, reflecting the importance and breath of the subject, nationally and internationally.

As organizer, I began with a team of leading free-market energy analysts (there were not that many of us). We were the first such group on the classical-liberal side. Over time, as the policy issues grew, several of my colleagues peeled off to blog at their home sites (Cato, CEI, etc.).

“There’s only one problem with this rash, hyperbolic onslaught on fossil fuels: everything about it is wrong. Far from destroying life on Earth, our discovery and exploitation of these fuels improved it enormously.”

“The hostility to fossil fuels seems increasingly to be driven by misanthropy rather than reason; by an elitist feeling of revulsion for the gains of modernity rather than by a rational assessment of the undoubted problems humankind still faces.” (Brendan O’Neill, SPIKED, November 12, 2021)

Alex Epstein, president and founder of Center for Industrial Progress, has not been alone in his quest to reframe the climate/energy debate in humanist terms. Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer of SPIKED, whose recent “Keep Burning Those Fossil Fuels” came to my attention, has been beating the fossil fuel/human betterment drum for some time.

“[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).