Master Resource turned one year old on December 26th. We have gone from a few hundred daily views to more than a thousand per day on average, and the quality and variety of our energy-related fare continues to improve.

Of the 4,100 ‘green blogs’ listed by Technorati, MasterResource consistently ranks in the top 50 and has broken into the top twenty. MasterResource is the top free-market energy blog with an All-Star list of nine principals and distinguished guest bloggers, including Robert Bryce, Indur Goklany, Mary Hutzler, Jim Manzi, Randall O’Toole, and Vaclav Smil.

Suffice it to say that we have exceeded expectations, and 2010 should see continued high quality and expanded reach and influence. We hope to increase our international presence and invite new voices into the energy and energy-related climate debates.…

“The use of wind power is as old as history.”

– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 62.

“The Federal Power Commission became interested in the Grandpa’s Knob [windpower] experiment during World War II, and commissioned Percy H. Thomas, a senior engineer of the commission, to investigate the potential of wind power production for the entire country. Thomas’ survey, Electric Power from the Wind, was published in March 1945.”

– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 545.

Last week I posted on the long history of solar energy to make the point that this technology is not an infant industry. The fact that solar cannot compete against grid electricity (off grid is another matter) today is proof positive that there is an inherent disadvantage with the dilute, intermittent flow of sunlight in the thriving carbon-based energy era.…

“Vice President [Al] Gore is wrong to call for the elimination of the internal combustion engine, and wrong again to call ‘absurd’ our current reliance on cars and trucks. Mobility is an essential and inseparable part of almost all that we value—from close-knit families to rewarding careers, quality educations, and fulfilling recreation. Mobility truly is what makes our autonomy possible. And cars, trucks, and the internal combustion engine are worth keeping because they make automobility itself increasingly sustainable.”

– Joseph Bast and Jay Lehr, “The Increasing Sustainability of Cars, Trucks, and the Internal Combustion Engine,” Heartland Institute Policy Study No. 95, June 2000, p. 54.

Part I of this two-part series described the primitive, messy, inefficient  prehistory of the mechanized transportation.  Today’s post provides quotations form different scholars that describe the great advances provided by carbon-based energy transportation.…

[Editor note: This excerpt from Bradley’s next book, Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies, is part of a five-chapter history of Samuel Insull, the father of the modern power industry.]

President Obama just returned from Copenhagen empty handed. His hometown will not get the 2016 Olympics, or as a representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Chicago operation advertised it, the “Blue Green Olympics.”

Given the science, economics, and politics of the global warming, aka climate change, it can be hoped that Obama–and the heads of all governments around the world–come away ’empty handed’ in Copenhagen in December. No town, city, province, or country should be burdened with energy rationing when consumer-driven, conventional energy has become more sustainable, not less.

The real global issue is economic recovery and growth, which means expanded private property and enhanced market institutions to promote sustainable growth in place of abject poverty and economic underperformance.…