[Editor Note: Just in time for Global Divestment Day, Professor Richard Ebeling offers a worldview of the philosophical basis of private property and voluntary exchange–human freedom–for the public policy debate.]
In American culture there is one persistent villain portrayed as the enemy of humanity, the perpetrator of deception, and the agent for social corruption and human harm: the businessman.
Whether in news commentaries or on the movie screen, the businessman is presented as a heartless, greedy manipulator so concerned with squeezing the last possible dollar out of anything he does, that he is willing to destroy the planet, kill his competitors, poison little children, and sell his own mother “down the river” if it will serve his material and financial purposes.
The only thing that saves us from the end of the world at the hands of these criminal private enterprisers is either some righteous individual who refuses to “take it any more” or the virtuous hand of a government agent dedicated to protecting mankind from those who, clearly, care nothing for the common good of humanity.…
Continue Reading“Although biomass is a renewable resource, much of it is currently used in ways that are neither renewable nor sustainable.”
– Christopher Flavin and Nicholas Lenssen (Worldwatch Institute), Power Surge. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994, pp. 176–77.
“We write to raise strong concerns about the November 19th, 2014, memo from Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Janet McCabe (McCabe memo), which would credit use of woody biomass for energy with reducing emissions, when it actually increases them…. Burning biomass instead of fossil fuels does not reduce the carbon emitted by power plants. In fact, as EPA itself acknowledges, burning biomass degrades facility efficiency and increases day-to-day emissions over emissions when fossil fuels are burned alone.”
– Letter from Dr. Viney P. Aneja et al. to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, February 9, 2015 (reprinted below).…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: In time for Global Divestment Day, MasterResource is pleased to reproduce this letter to Stanford University president John Hennessy from Kathleen Hartnett-White, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Dated May 30, 2014, this letter remains highly relevant today. (Ms. Hartnett-White is speaking tonight at the sold-out event at the University of Houston, “Private Profit vs. Public Good: Do Energy Companies Have a Social Responsibility?“)
“Stanford’s decision to divest in coal is a symbol for the elite that regrettably reflects indifference to the poor across the world who have never seen a light switch.”
Dear President Hennessy,
I am an Honors graduate of Stanford holding B.A. and M.A. degrees in the Humanities and served as Chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for six years.…
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