“The distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources is tenuous and perhaps in the last analysis untenable.”
– M. A. Adelman, The Economics of Petroleum Supply (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 66.
M. A. Adelman, profiled yesterday, was an empirically driven energy economist. He was not a Malthusian because the data suggested otherwise. He found with petroleum what Julian Simon found in the the family of mineral resources.
Adelman’s writings richly describe the way to understand the paradox of expanding depletable resources. He emphasized that oil was a fungible, global commodity, and improving knowledge can overcome diminishing returns in different regions and certainly globally.
And Adelman captured a point that Alex Epstein today stresses: that oil is not a ‘natural resource’ but a man-made one, from finding the treasure in the ground to refining the raw material into useful human products to transporting the inputs to delivering the outputs to points of human consumption.…
Continue Reading“Diminishing returns are opposed by increasing knowledge, both of the earth’s crust and of methods of extraction and use. The price of oil, like that of any mineral, is the uncertain fluctuating result of the conflict.”
– M. A. Adelman, quoted in Michael Lynch, “Morris A. Adelman, Petroleum Economist, Has Passed Away,” Forbes, May 9, 2014.
A giant of petroleum economics, MIT economist Morry Adelman, died last week at the age of 96. (A short mention in the Boston Globe is here.)
Unlike the Malthusians and peak-oilers in particular, Adelman kept his eye on marginal costs and institutions (resource ownership, government policy) to understand that oil was not a fixed, depleting asset but, at least potentially, a super-abundant, expanding one. To grow and thrive, petroleum needed market incentives just like plants need water to grow and thrive.…
Continue Reading“This is not sober, balanced science; it is ObamaScience for open-ended government planning.”
Despite uncooperative data regarding global warming (in a 15+ year ‘pause’), hurricanes, and tornadoes; despite the failure of climate models to predict and thus explain; despite the inability of the same models to attribute regionally; and despite the well-known benefits of carbon dioxide fertilization and moderately warmer/wetter climate scenarios, Obama and the Malthusian Left (including many cooperating scientists) soldier on.
But it will not be easy. The all-in effort to stretch climate science beyond the normal peer-review literature (John Holdren got his wish) may well backfire. Good science drives out bad, and the public is already alerted to the politicization of climate science and the nefarious agenda of “saving the planet.”
A Wall Street Journal article, “Obama Climate Push Faces a Lukewarm Public,” explained the climate conundrum.…
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