“[My] early writing was from a viewpoint that there was an ocean of BTUs beneath our feet, and what was high cost and supplemental today would become low cost and conventional later. I ‘trusted’ human ingenuity. I turned out ‘right’ for the wrong technological reason: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”

Any intellectual is interested in what is written about him or her, whether it be in the newspaper or an essay, book, or doctoral dissertation. In my case, being of 66 summers, and having a lot of scholarship under my belt, I do not worry much about the momentary ad hominem stuff. But for the record, I am eager to correct with facts and interpretation as needed.

This brings me to a dissertation, “Limits and Cornucopianism: A History of Neo-Liberal Environmental Thought, 1920–2007” (New York University: 2019).…

“You have been led to water–please drink and pass the cup. The Malthusian worldview, while stubbornly mainstream, is in trouble. Studying Population Bombed! is the road to optimism–and away from the road to serfdom.”

A very important book has turned three years old. Population Bombed!: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change (Global Warming Policy Foundation: 2018) by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurkmak is a tour-de-force, with a deepness of research and full presentation that is missing from almost all books on sustainable development.

The authors should be familiar to readers at MasterResource. A two-part interview with Ms. Szurmak is here and here; with Pierre Desrochers here.

The authors have usefully provided a summary of their book, inviting one and all to read and assess, pro or con.…

“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.…

“… 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 ingenuity. Resourceship 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.…