“An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat…. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction.”
– Fidel Castro, Rio Earth Summit, 1992.
“If you look at the time since 1992, we sort of started out with a bang with Rio and Kyoto. [Since then] things have slowed down.”
– Tim Wirth (U.N. Foundation Vice Chairman; former State Department Undersecretary for Global Affairs). Quoted in Lisa Friedman, “The Diplomatic Road to a New Climate Agreement May Not End in Paris Next Year,” ClimateWire (sub. req.),
Fidel Castro (1926–), one the great wealth destroyers and wealth averters of the last fifty years (he came to power in 1961), has come back in public after an eight-month absence. …
[Ed. note: Julian Simon, born February 12, 1932, died four days before his 66th birthday. He would have been 82 years old today. MasterResource takes its name from Simon’s term for energy, and we publish on his oeuvre from time to time.]
Thirty-three years after its publication by Princeton University Press, The Ultimate Resource remains insightful and timely—if not timeless. Simon’s Ultimate Resource 2, published in 1996, greatly expanded upon the original, but the major themes were not changed due to the solid worldview that Simon had developed in the 1970s.]
Energy: The Master Resource
“Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important.”…
“Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won… Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.”
– Robert Heilbroner, “The Triumph of Capitalism,” The New Yorker, January 23, 1989, p. 98.
A major event in the history of political economy thought occurred in 1989 when socialist economics writer Robert Heilbroner (1919–2005) renounced his belief in central planning in the pages of the New Yorker. For anti-market liberals, this made it official: socialism was out of the mainstream. Socialism could not plan a modern economy and was an open sesame for totalitarianism. Hayek said as much in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom. A trusted voice on the Left confirmed it 45 years later.…