A Free-Market Energy Blog

MasterResource: New Principals Joining In

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 5, 2022

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.). But new voices were discovered, some professional economists and others being “talented amateurs” who became passionate about the issues, did their research, and made contributions at a high level.

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Today’s announcement brings a new talented bunch to the forefront: Richard Fulmer, Craig D. Idso, and Joanna Szurmak.

The holdovers are myself, longtime editor Roger Donway, and natural gas/efficiency expert Mark Krebs. Three new principals are:

Richard W. Fulmer. A gifted thinker and writer, Fulmer was the primary author of Energy: The Master Resource (Kendall-Hunt: 2004), which Milton Friedman praised as a “splendid book … effectively debunk[ing] the widespread predictions of energy doom.”

Writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, Fulmer is a past winner of that organization’s Eugene S. Thorpe writing competition and the Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing. He is a former senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. His most recent MasterResource blog is here; he co-authors research with Bradley (see here).

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Craig D. Idso is the founder and CEO of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a non-profit public charity dedicated to discovering and disseminating scientific information pertaining to the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment on climate and the biosphere. The Center produces CO2 Science online and maintains a comprehensive online collection of editorials on and reviews of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles relating to global climate change.

Dr. Idso’s research has appeared many times in peer-reviewed journals, including Geophysical Research LettersEnvironmental and Experimental BotanyForest Ecology and ManagementJournal of ClimatePhysical GeographyAtmospheric EnvironmentTechnologyThe Quarterly Review of BiologyEnergy & Environment, and the Journal of the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science.

He is the author or co-author of The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2011); CO2, Global Warming and Species Extinctions (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2009); CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2009); Enhanced or Impaired? Human Health in a CO2-Enriched Warmer World (Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, 2003); and The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming Decimate Earth’s Biosphere? (George C. Marshall Institute, 2003).

Dr. Idso received a B.S. in Geography from Arizona State University; an M.S. in Agronomy from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln; and a Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University.

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Joanna Szurmak of the University of Toronto Mississauga is co-author (with Pierre Desrochers) of Population Bombed!, shortlisted for the 2018-2019 Donner Prize for best public policy book written by Canadian authors. Her associations in the liberty movement include the Fraser Institute, Institute for Humane Studies, Institute for Liberal Studies, Liberty Fund, and Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.

Joanna holds three degrees from the University of Toronto: a Bachelor and Master’s of Applied Science, Electrical Engineering, and a Master’s in Library and Information Studies. She is currently at the dissertation stage of her doctorate in Science and Technology Studies, York University (Toronto, Canada), on the impact on economic thought of the work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs.

MasterResource’s two-part profile of Ms. Szurmak is here and here.


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