“If good and evil are measured by the standard of human well-being and human progress, we must conclude that the fossil fuel industry is not a necessary evil to be restricted but a superior good to be liberated.”
“We don’t need green energy–we need humanitarian energy.”
“The 2016 election presents us with a once-in-a-lifetime energy opportunity–and energy danger. There is no middle ground. There can be no more standing down. It’s time to stand up.”
– Alex Epstein, “At CERAWeek Fossil Fuel Leaders Should Make A Moral Case For Their Industry,” Forbes.com., February 18, 2016.
For many years, make that decades, I have noted Daniel Yergin’s political bias at the annual CERA conference here in Houston. Nonindustry speakers have routinely been climate alarmists and anti-fossil fuel proponents, picked from both the government and the nonprofit sector.…
[Editor note: Julian Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) is remembered each year at MasterResource.]
“The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.”
– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 11.
“The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”
– Julian Simon, “Introduction,” in Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 27.
Julian Simon would have turned 84 last week. MasterResource, which is named in his honor, applies Simon’s ultimate resource insight to the master resource of energy and to related environmental issues.…
“Price controls cause shortages, and government allocation exacerbates it. This was learned the hard way during the 1970s, particularly with oil, thanks to Republican President Richard Nixon.”
George Melloan’s review of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2016) criticized her foray into energy and energy policy:
Ms. Mayer might herself benefit from an economics course. She writes that Richard Nixon imposed economic controls on oil and gas in 1971 to “address the energy crisis.” The Nixon price controls helped to cause the energy crisis.
Intrigued, I bought Dark Money to see exactly what she said. Here is the passage from Mayer (p. 91) referenced by Melloan:
…The fossil fuel industry’s fondest wishes were also fulfilled.