[Editor note: Pierre Desrochers, who guest posts with us for the first time, is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto.]

Paul Ehrlich’s best-seller The Population Bomb  turned 40 last year. The latest issue of the peer-reviewed (and somewhat iconoclastic) Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development is devoted to the book, its impact, and the validity of its main message. It features contributions by both Paul and Anne Ehrlich, who mostly stand by their original analysis, and some of their critics who challenge their basic premise and supportive evidence.

Despite a now widespread popular perception that The Population Bomb was a pioneering work, it originally drew little attention. In fact, it was just the latest in a long line of books, reports, essays and pamphlets on the population issue published in post-World War II America.…

[Editor note: This interview with Rob Bradley from the April 2006 issue of The New Individualist, published by The Atlas Society, is reproduced for two reasons: 1) the role of Lay and Enron in launching the global warming debate within the energy industry in the late 1980s and 1990s; 2) the role of Bradley during his 16 years at the company brought up by critics of the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance.]

TNI: Why should Objectivists, libertarians, and individualists take an interest in the collapse of Enron and particularly in the fall of Ken Lay?

Bradley: Enron will prove to be one of the most important episodes in the history of American business, and its story, from beginning to end, is inseparable from Ken Lay, its founder and long-time chairman.…

Last week, I attended a briefing on “Climate Change, Energy and National Security,” sponsored by the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a veritable who’s who of (mostly former) moderate-to-liberal defense and foreign policy officials. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), former CIA Director James Woolsey, Ambassador Frank Wisner, and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn USN (Ret.) were the featured speakers.

The self-described “blue ribbon” panel was unanimous, unequivocal, and very, very repetitive: Climate change is a national security issue; climate change threatens all Americans; combatting climate change should be a national security priority; transitioning to a clean energy economy can defeat both the climate change threat and the OPEC/Wahhabi/Terror threat.

Not-So-Strange-Strange Bedfellows

In one respect it’s surprising that climate change has not always been characterized as a national security issue. If Al Gore is correct and climate change “threatens the survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth,” then of course climate change imperils national security.…

As a Democract, I have asked myself how it is that the current administration could be so consistently wrong on energy policy. There was a time in the days of Bob Kerr, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Bennett Johnson that energy policy was bipartisan. In fact, those Democratic wheel horses from the great Southwest made sure that the policy–particularly as regarded oil and gas– was somewhat rational.

Carter Was Pro-Drilling Compared to Obama

The last Democratic President to acknowledge the need for exploration was Jimmy Carter, under whom I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oil and Gas. Carter pushed both an offshore 5-year leasing plan and production from the Naval Petroleum Reserves. I know–I was in charge of both.

So despite the Windfall Profits Tax and much hyperbolic rhetoric, President Carter had a foot, or at least a few toes, in the pro-production camp.…