Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.

There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…

W. S. Jevons in his early day recognized a central problem of windpower for powering machinery–intermittency. The wind does not always blow, and it cannot be known when this will occur, making an even flow of power (as from conventional sources) impossible short of cost-prohibitive battery backup.

What about the other renewables of the day: water power, biomass, and geothermal?…

The most important book ever written on energy economics was published in 1865 by William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Company). This classic is out of print but available in its entirety on the Internet. It is well worth reading. The book marks the birth of an entire discipline, and Jevons’s remarkably sophisticated treatment of energy sustainability remains pertinent today. In a real sense, the Biden approach to energy was refuted by the insight of W. S. Jevons almost 150 years ago.

Jevons makes four points regarding windpower. …

Editor Note: On December 26, 2008, Robert L. Bradley Jr. launched the free-market energy blog, MasterResource. This inaugural post is reproduced verbatim.

“… our blog name is inspired by the late Julian Simon (1932–1998). He labeled energy the master resource because it is the resource needed to bring other resources from a state of nature to one of human usefulness. Simon also used the term the ultimate resource to describe human ingenuity.”

We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items. When I read my newspapers each day, I have some thoughts that I wish I could share with folks from a historical, worldview perspective. I think we all have something to add–and thus the inspiration for this endeavor.…