Resourceful Earth Day (celebrate freedom, innovation)

By Pierre Desrochers and Jasmin Guénette -- April 22, 2021 1 Comment

“What many environmentalists seem incapable of understanding is that resources are created. After all, crude oil is just sludge until you get it out of the ground and figure out how to use it as an energy source.”

“This Earth Day, we should all give two green thumbs up for human freedom and innovation.”

There is a certain fringe of the environmentalist movement whose members have almost nothing good to say about their fellow men and women. If not for humans, they sometimes explicitly argue, the Earth would be a wonderful place. The lion might not lie down with the lamb, but at least “nature” would be allowed to run its course unobstructed by humankind—which in their reckoning is somehow not a part of nature.

Admittedly, humans have a particular nature that sets them apart from the rest of the fauna on this planet.…

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Giving Thanks … for Human Ingenuity

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 25, 2020 1 Comment

“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.” – Erich Zimmermann (1951).

Thanksgiving 2020 presents an opportunity to step back and appreciate the driver of progress in the free economy: the liberated, liberating entrepreneur. The change-makers of the market drive the creation and usage of resources, as well documented by the oil and gas extraction revolution of the last decade or more.

Increasing “depletable”  resources is a paradigmatic example of what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource,” human ingenuityResourceship is a term that the followers of Erich Zimmermann, from Stephen McDonald to Pierre Desrochers, have popularized to understand mineral development.

Salient quotations from seven sources follow: institutional economist Zimmermann; fellow institutionalists Wesley Mitchell and Tom DeGregori; political scientist David Osterfeld; economists Terry Anderson and Donald Leal; economist M.

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Malthusianism Reconsidered: Desrochers on Smil

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 22, 2020 1 Comment

 “Civilization’s advance can be seen as a quest for higher energy use required to produce increased food harvests, to mobilize a greater output and variety of materials, to produce more, and more diverse, goods, to enable higher mobility, and to create access to a virtually unlimited amount of information.” (Smil, Energy and Civilization, quoted below)

“Fortunately, basic numbers don’t lie, and what they convey is that, in the context of market economies, past Promethean writers proved much more right than their opponents.” (Desrochers, below)

Pierre Desrochers (Department of Geography, Geomatics and the Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga) is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of energy and sustainable development. A generation ahead of Desrochers is Vaclav Smil, a renowned expert in energy history and technology whose profuse writings document his energy worldview–at least most of it.…

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Joanna Szurmak Interview: Extending the Julian Simon Worldview (Part II: Population Bombed!)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 24, 2020 7 Comments

This completes our two-part review (Part I here) of the development and worldview of Joanna Szurmak, whose work with Pierre Desrochers is at the forefront of classical-liberal scholarship in sustainable development.

Q. And the shorter pieces led to something bigger—a book, Population Bombed!

A. Yes. Since Julian Simon’s influence and inspiration was in our minds, in late 2017 we realized that Simon’s nemesis, Paul Ehrlich, was approaching the 50th anniversary of his bestseller, The Population Bomb (1968). This slim book—really a collection of Ehrlich’s lecture notes that his wife and life-long collaborator Anne Ehrlich stitched together into a narrative—became a manifesto to population-control activists around the world.

Like Simon, we disagreed with both the premises and the arguments of those who Pierre likes to call the “population bombers.” But we had been noticing an upsurge in calls to impose controls on world population in the name of environmental health and climate justice.

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Joanna Szurmak Interview: Extending the Julian Simon Worldview (Part I: Worldview)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 23, 2020 2 Comments Continue Reading

Petroleum Trash to Treasure: Market Incentives Spark Human Ingenuity

By -- June 17, 2020 No Comments Continue Reading

The Flawed Worldview of ‘Planet of the Humans’ (Part II)

By -- May 21, 2020 3 Comments Continue Reading

The Flawed Worldview of ‘Planet of the Humans’ (Part I)

By -- May 20, 2020 4 Comments Continue Reading

Clarence Ayres on Human Ingenuity (1944 insights for today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 4, 2020 1 Comment Continue Reading

Climate Alarmism and Malthusianism (rebuttal to Taylor)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 25, 2020 2 Comments Continue Reading