To illustrate that the world is not in any meaningful way overpopulated, Julian Simon noted that if everyone in the world moved to Texas, each person would still have about 1,800 square feet of living space. Enough room for a family of four to live in an average size house with a front and back yard.

Since Simon made these calculations in The Ultimate Resource 2, the world’s population has grown. Recalculating for a world of 6 billion is 1,500 square feet per person, which still leaves 6,000 square feet for a family of four (a still comfortable 60- by-100-foot lot, with plenty of space for multiple story living).

But what about the roads, parks, lakes, shopping malls, my students ask? If I say everyone in the world could live in Texas, they want to know about the amenities.…

“Hansen has distain for all-hat, no-cattle renewables, was the subject of two recent MasterResource posts: Is the Environmental Movement Net CO2 Positive? (James Hansen wants to know) and Energy Realism Amid Climate Alarmism: James Hansen Rides Again. It is nuclear or bust, if it is not already bust, according to Hansen’s energy math.” – Robert Bradley, “Game, Set, Match Fossil Fuels? James Hansen Sleepless in Ningbo,” March 13, 2014.

James Hansen continues to speak energy truth to Environmental Power about the primary of fossil fuels; the need for affordable, plentiful, reliable energy;  and the dead-end, the distraction, of renewable-energy forcing and mandated energy conservation. Here are some contributions to the energy reality debate from his March 13th testimony at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing, Keystone XL and the National Interest Determination:

“I am sorry that we scientists have not done an adequate job of communicating energy facts.”

“Recent events have been spiraling down so rapidly that I find it hard to sleep. Ex-President Clinton campaigns for a huge pipeline to carry Canadian tar sands…. Dogged insistence by environmental groups that intermittent renewable energies are the only alternative to fossil fuels.…”

Writing from China earlier this week, and no doubt preparing his testimony for Thursday’s “Keystone XL and the National Interest Determination” hearing in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, climate scientist/policy activist James Hansen has once again laid bare the internal contradictions of Big Green’s codependency on dilute ‘green’.

In his missive Sleepless in Ningbo, Dr. Hansen described how the Chinese authorities during a tour of the country’s renewable projects gave him some sobering news. China’s energy pie is divided into 78% coal, 12% gas, 7% oil, and 3% renewables.…

[Editor’s note: From time to time MasterResource will interview leading scholars in the free-market energy and environmental tradition. This is our first interview.]

MR: Ken, describe your current position at the Fraser Institute in Canada.

KG: I am Senior Director of Fraser’s Centre for Natural Resources, which studies public policy involving natural resource management. Primarily, we study mining and energy policy, but there are elements of environmental and even agricultural policy that fall under the aegis of my Center.

MR: What is the mission of Fraser?

KG: The informal way I describe our mission is that we study public policy and educate Canadians (and global audiences as well) about the impact that public policy choices have on people’s lives.

Those impacts might be at the level of the individual, where people want to see how schools rank in order to pick a school for their children; the impacts might be at the household level where we show people what a proposed or existing public policy might cost their household on an annual basis; they might be the effects a policy will have on their provincial competitiveness or fiscal stability; and it might be at the global level where we rank the countries of the world on economic freedom, or the hospitality of global jurisdictions to mining investment.…