“Running out of resources” has been a common refrain among the intellectual class and policymakers since the beginning of the oil industry. L. C. Gray (1913) and Harold Hotelling (1931) cemented the fixity-depletion view of minerals that swept the economics profession; so did the presidency of Jimmy Carter, in the (regulatory-induced) troubled 1970s.
Remember the lament of James Schlesinger, the first energy secretary for Carter’s new Department of Energy: “We have a classic Malthusian case of exponential growth against a finite source.” And the confident conclusion of Amory Lovins:
All oil and gas resources should be carefully husbanded—i.e. extracted as late and as slowly as possible. Our descendents will be grateful. We, too, shall need a long bridge to the future.
But when surplus conditions with oil and gas returned in the 1980s, the lost voices of Erich Zimmermann and M.…
The free-market energy blog MasterResource turns three years old today. On December 26, 2008, the blog started on the strength of several noted free market scholars buying into a ‘movement’ blog instead of an institution-specific one. A thank you at this reflective time goes to Ken Green (AEI), Marlo Lewis (CEI), and Jerry Taylor (Cato), in particular.
MasterResource views stand at 1.1 million. While not a megablog, ours is a high-quality contribution to the current energy debate–and a resource for the historical record (our extensive index categories number 380).
We have published approximately 914 posts from approximately 115 authors. Some are widely published; others are talented amateurs who have chosen to do what the ‘experts’ choose not to do: uncover the problems of politically correct energies. Comments from our loyal, sophisticated readership add substance to many of the in-depth posts.…
“Business that is everything to everyone is not anything at all in itself.”
– Elaine Sternberg, Just Business: Business Ethics in Action. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 33.
No doubt his handlers have given Al Gore the word: go easy on climate warming (aka climate change). The issue has little traction. You are the wrong voice for the cause. Solyndra. Climategate 2.0. Winter snows…. Not now, Al.
Take it up a notch! they must be telling him. Think bigger. Subsume the issue…. And so Gore’s new piece in the Wall Street Journal barely mentions his pet issue of (man-made) climate change but something much larger and amorphous.
“A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,” coauthored with David Blood, calls for “abandoning short-term economic thinking for ‘sustainable capitalism’.” Such is code for that subjective, holistic, anything goes doctrine of corporate social responsibility, which I elsewhere questioned as follows:
…The discipline of business ethics should be reoriented around a more sophisticated understanding of capitalism proper.