The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science. It’s all spelled out at WiseEnergy.org, which has a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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Greed Energy Economics:

Senate Committee Report Details Environmentalists’ Inner Workings

Senate Report: How Billionaires Control the Environmental Movement

The hidden persuaders of the environmental elite

Blowing Our Dollars in the Wind

Do Some Energy Math…

“Economists have long argued that these [national security] claims are based on economic misunderstandings, yet they are still cited as political justifications for military deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East. These policies along with past military interventions are at the root of international terrorism directed at the United States.”

Military generals are charged with managing national security, which has included ensuring access to “needed” natural resources. U.S. military goals have been further stretched to securing access to resources “needed” for economic security.

The first U.S. overseas seizure concerned bird guano, a fertilizer like no other at the time. If Peru insisted on getting a lot of money for this valuable product, the only solution was invasion. The U.S. Congress, in response to public opinion, passed the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which authorized Americans to take any guano deposits they discovered.…

“Generally, I’d like to be remembered for helping to form a better connection and awareness between innovation and free markets and the tremendous improvements modern energy brings to people. That’s the essence of my progressive nature, so maybe I haven’t strayed to far from my early liberal bent, just on the best ways to achieve good results. Be clear on results versus intentions.”

MasterResource from time to time conducts interviews with leading free-market scholars (see Ken Green here). This completes the Tanton interview, Part I of which was yesterday.

Q. Let’s turn from traditional pollutants to climate change. What work have you done here?

TT: My focus has been more on policies that strive to address emissions, rather than climate modeling. I’ll leave that to those more qualified, as long as they adhere to scientific process.…

“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.…