“On the climate issue, RFF has become the intellectual arm of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), just as RFF board member David Hawkins (of NRDC) desires.”

Resources for the Future (RFF) was once a much more scholarly think tank than it is today. It did not assume but evaluated and debated energy economics and related environmental issues.

On climate change, in particular, RFF has gone into the tank of alarmism–and is now a full-fledged foe of the free-market-oriented energy policies underway in the Trump Administration. In fact, RFF has become the intellectual arm of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), just as RFF board member David Hawkins (of NRDC) desires.

Sad, sad. From its glorious beginning in the 1950s and 1960s–publishing treatises and shorter studies on resource availability–RFF went Malthusian in the 1970s, a story recounted by the late mineral economist Richard Gordon and myself elsewhere.…

“I think [Julian Simon] probably should have been considered for a Nobel Prize.  He took a very independent position with little backing, dug deep and provided very good evidence for his predictions and expectations.”

“I do not believe there is a natural resource economics.  I believe there is good economics and bad economics.”

• Milton Friedman (below)

Editor note: Milton Friedman would be 105 this day. Born July 31, 1912, in New York City, he died on November 16, 2006, in San Francisco, age 94.

Reprinted below is an exchange between Robert Bradley Jr. and the Milton Friedman when the Nobel Laureate was 91 years old–a testament to the patience, scholarship, and longevity of one of the greatest social thinkers of modern time.

“‘An inability to tolerate views different’? ‘Rage reactions’? Can we apply this mental health standard to Joe Romm and James Hansen, not to mention Paul Ehrlich in his diatribes against Julian Simon?”

“This is ironic to those of us who have encountered angry neo-Malthusians trying to wake us up to the coming food famine (1960s warnings), resource famine (1970s warnings), and, most recently, climate alarmism. Does this standard apply to them as it does to all things Trump?”

I have resubscribed to the New York Times. I received a 50 percent discount, and with Trump’s upset win in November I wanted to better understand what the intellectual/media elite were thinking. (And the answer is … they still don’t get it.)

In the Letters section of February 14th edition, I encountered “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump.”…

“The Obama Administration brought out the worst in RFF in the last eight years. Will the Trump era of new energy/climate thinking be intellectually respected and debated under RFF’s new president, Richard Newell? One can only hope that RFF does not become Fortress RFF.”

“RFF’s blockade against critics of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation is a sad case of intellectual back-of-the-bus, separate-water-fountain discrimination.”

“RFF has trenchantly avoided a real debate over the ‘social cost of carbon’ (SCC). Yet the assumptions behind the Obama Administration’s SCC are highly disputable, and reasonable assumptions can flip the sign from positive to negative (as in CO2 has net benefits) to eviscerate any case for pricing CO2.”

Maybe it is only because they have to.

Resources for the Future (RFF), founded in 1952, describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan organization that conducts rigorous economic research and analysis to help leaders make better decisions and craft smarter policies about natural resources and the environment” that is “committed to intellectual excellence and practical solutions.”…