Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that the growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals. Instead, … [Read more...]
Blame the Gristmills
You may remember the extremely cold winter of 2021. In Texas, the system of electricity collapsed; 4.5 million homes lost power—for days. More than 200 people died, half of them of hypothermia (cold). This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. Texas’s electric utilities are regulated, and the regulation had been modernized beginning in 1999. Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash Why wasn’t the public interest served? The issue is so complicated that I can’t answer that question. But … [Read more...]
The “Madness of Crowds”?
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so. I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity probably contributes to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming negatively affects politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education. I will look at two disastrous … [Read more...]
Trade-Offs: Biden’s Push for Bio-energy from Agriculture Worries Environmentalists
The “Inflation Reduction Act” will provide $140 billion in agricultural “tax incentives, loans, and grants” to promote energy. Environmentalists are not happy. Keith Schneider of the New York Times writes: “Despite pushback from environmental groups concerned about increased pollution from farm waste, developers across the country see opportunities to build ambitious renewable energy projects to convert crops and agricultural wastes to low-carbon energy. “But environmental groups … [Read more...]
Australia’s Great Coral Reef Is Alive and Well. Why Hide That Fact?
(This file has been updated.) Peter Ridd, who examined current data about Australia’s Great Coral Reef, demolishes fears that the reef is sick or dying. He asks why the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) is obscuring that fact by failing to aggregate the data. Image: Creative Commons under Unsplash However, perhaps recognizing that Ridd (a controversial figure) was studying the reef, AIMS has just announced that two-thirds of the reef has the most coral cover it has since … [Read more...]
The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation. “The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues. Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a … [Read more...]
