The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change

Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation

Jerome R. Corsi

• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781637582794
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book exposes the truth that the climate change hoax is a political movement aimed at eliminating capitalism by spreading alarming disinformation that in order to "save the Earth" from global warming, we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies. The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation reveals a science-based understanding of Earth's climate and temperature that Green New Deal proponents are trying to hide. In the pages of this book, you will see scientifically documented evidence for many facts that the radical left denies.Want to know the truth about how energy, temperature, and climate work? Read The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change —but prepare to be shocked. Jerome R. Corsi has conducted a tour-de-force examination of peer-reviewed climate science that exposes the neo-Marxists behind today's anti-capitalist global warming hoax.

CHAPTER 1

Julian L. Simon: Eco-Sage and Natural Resources Optimist

Why is there so much false bad news about the subjects of the environment, resources, and population?… An even tougher question is this one: Why do we believe so much false bad news about the environment, resources, and population?

—Julian Simon, Hoodwinking the Nation, 1999¹

AFTER A CAREER AS AN ECONOMICS and business professor, Julian Simon passed away prematurely at sixty-five years old in 1998 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. At the end of his life, Simon held a position as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., his last job after a longtime career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, followed by an academic position at the University of Maryland. Born in 1932 in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Harvard University, Simon received his Ph.D. in business economics from the University of Chicago in 1961. Among “Green Energy” true believers, Simon has become infamous for taking a contrarian position on energy resources, arguing that our perception of scarcity is a psychological fear, one not validated by the current or historical factual record of energy abundance.

In the 1999 foreword to Simon’s first book to be published posthumously, Hoodwinking the Nation, author Ben Joseph Wattenberg, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., commented that Simon often felt angry that he was being ignored or ridiculed by opponents who belonged to a vast Malthusian population-environment-resources conspiracy of crisis. Today, Malthusians have captured the politically correct mainstream media, rejecting Simon’s contention that supplies of natural resources, including energy, are not finite and exhaustible. Simon saw the human intellect as the ultimate, infinitely renewable resource, and its potential as unlimited. He argued we would never run out of energy resources, including oil, coal, and natural gas, provided our energy resources are “mixed…with intellect.”²

What distinguishes Simon from the Malthusians was that Simon saw human beings as the solution, not the problem. In direct contrast, Malthusians see human beings as a menace that threatens the very survival of the planet itself. Wattenberg understood this precisely, noting the attacks on Simon were often intensely personal. Simon’s detractors demeaned him by stating his doctorate was “merely in business economics” and that he taught business-oriented subjects like advertising and marketing. Simon was ridiculed for starting a mail-order business and daring to write a book on how to run a successful and profitable one. “Never mind that he studied population economics for a quarter of a century and the mail-order book is still in print and in its fifth edition,” Wattenberg commented.³ Simon was perplexed that the environmental movement did not appreciate his extensive research and many publications about natural resources. What drove the “enviros” crazy, Wattenberg explained, was the following:

But, irony again, it was Simon’s knowledge of real-world commerce that gave him an edge in the intellectual wars. He knew first-hand about some things that many environmentalists of the time had only touched gingerly, like prices. If the ultimate resource was the human intellect, Simon reasoned, and the amount of human intellect was increasing both qualitatively and quantitatively, thanks to population growth, education, and technology, why, then, the supply of resources would grow, outrunning demand, pushing prices down, giving people more access to what they wanted, with more than enough left over to deal with pollution—in short, the very opposite of a crisis.⁴

Wattenberg calculated correctly that Simon’s knowledge of the business world gave him an edge over the Malthusians in the intellectual wars. Suppose Simon is correct that the ultimate human resource was the human intellect. In that case, Wattenberg argued, it could also be right that our supply of natural resources would grow over time, outpacing demand, pushing prices down. Wattenberg correctly understood that Simon’s vision is a severe threat to the supposed crisis in natural resources that the Malthusians desperately want us to believe is inevitable. Simon’s argument is simple: scientifically proven facts contradict the Malthusian doom-and-gloom narrative we see pervasive today in popular culture.

Appropriately, Simon titled his autobiography, published posthumously, A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist.⁵ Contrary to everything Simon argued in his numerous published writings, today’s politically correct popular culture demands universal acquiesce to the proposition that human beings have created the conditions of our demise as a species. About energy resources, the politically correct popular culture requires an agreement that our wanton burning of hydrocarbon fuels has tossed so much toxic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we have created a greenhouse effect that will result in catastrophic climate change.

In characteristic prose, Simon began Hoodwinking the Nation with an essay summarizing the human history of utilizing natural resources, including energy as follows:

Every resource economist knows that all natural resources have been getting more available rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate has been falling all over the world; life expectancy almost tripled in the rich countries in the past two centuries and almost doubled in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most important and amazing demographic fact—the greatest human achievement in human history. It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high 20s about 1750. Suddenly, about 1750, life expectancy in the richest countries began to rise so that the length of a life that could be expected for a baby or an adult in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to perhaps 75 years. Then starting well after World War II, the length of life that could be expected in the poor countries leaped upwards by perhaps 15 or even 20 years because of advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. It is this decrease in the death rate that has caused there to be a larger world population nowadays than in former times.⁶

Today, the politically correct mainstream media would brand anyone daring to publish an argument favoring continued global use of hydrocarbon fuels as an “environmental lunatic” or possibly even an “ecological criminal.” At the end of his life, Simon realized his optimism regarding the human capacity to utilize natural resources for our betterment as a species would brand him as a fringe nut case. “I was not cut out to be a Mafia boss,” Simon wrote in the preface to his autobiography. “I am more like a competent and hard-working plumber or building contractor or burlesque-show baggy pants comedian, though I have more kooky ideas than most of them.”⁷ Yet, throughout his life, Simon insisted the results of his studies and his writings would turn out to be correct.

Over the years, I managed to acquire a student-used copy of Simon’s 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource.⁸ On the title page of the book, the student handwrote her assessment of Simon’s work: “[The author is] a rich white male who has never left his office—world of graphs, equations, and charts that he bases all his theories on. Graphs, e.g., charts that are not comprehensive and only tell if population is up, if aggregate output is up, if fertility, mortality is up…but none of the other factors—environmental consequences, inequalities, humans are a resource—no limits to their abilities and innovations. Exploit the Earth and other planets if necessary to serve humans, income up…no intrinsic value in nature—only there to serve man.” The polemical tone of these comments clarified that already by the 1980s, these arguments on the left were entering the realm of ideology.

Reading those comments today, I am not surprised that in this age of the neo-Marxist critical race theory, the student began her analysis of Simon’s work with an ad hominem attack, pointing out that he was a white man and an academic? The student dismissed the research Simon documented in the book by insisting today’s natural resource policies have produced no adverse environmental consequences and economic inequality. So, what system would the student have preferred? Would using fewer resources to preserve a more pristine environment be better, even at the cost of shortening life expectancies? Would that have been fairer to all races, all sexes, all cultures, and all religions? Today university courses rarely teach Simon’s economics. Why? Because he refused to accept the orthodox conviction that we humans apply our limited intellects only to exploit, for our selfish good, the precious and scarce natural resources of our mother, Earth.

The Malthusian view has convinced millions that Earth has entered a new and final hypothesized era of geological time, the Anthropocene era. Malthusians insist that anthropogenic carbon dioxide will cause such catastrophic global warming and subsequent climate change that human activity is responsible for bringing about a coming sixth extinction. Malthusians argue that the sixth extinction will dwarf the previous “Big Five” extinctions in which nearly all life on Earth disappeared, rivaling even the giant meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous Period, some sixty-six million years ago. Malthusians warn us that the sixth extinction will be the last this time, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Simon took a lot of abuse during his life for running against the politically correct popular culture by not adhering to Malthusian views. However, in his final analysis, Simon understood it was more important to be right about natural resources than to have a mass audience applaud his genius. That was especially true when we appreciate that the need to “decarbonize” and move to a “zero emissions” world if we are to “Save the Planet” are all views Julian Simon found hopelessly uninformed.

Why We Will Never Run Out of Oil

In his revised 1996 book, The Ultimate Resource 2, Julian Simon devoted chapter 11 to the question: “When Will We Run Out of Oil?” In the chapter title, Simon gave a one-word answer to his question: “Never!” Simon argued that energy is the master resource because “energy allows us to convert one material to another.”⁹ He argued that the low energy costs afforded by hydrocarbon fuels enable modern technological society to thrive. “On the other hand, if there were to be an absolute shortage of energy—that is, if there were no oil in the tanks, no natural gas in the pipelines, no coal to load onto the railroad cars—then the entire economy would come to a halt,” he wrote. “Or, if energy were available, but at a very high price, we would produce much smaller amounts of most consumer goods and services.”¹⁰ Simon proceeded to elaborate: “The history of energy economics shows that, in spite of troubling fears in each era of running out of whatever source of energy was important at that time, energy has grown progressively less scarce, as shown by long-run falling energy prices.”¹¹

Simon traced fears of energy resource exhaustion back to an 1865 book published in London by W. Stanley Jevons, one of the nineteenth century’s most outstanding social scientists, entitled The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines.¹² Jevons argued Great Britain’s industrial progress would halt because industry would soon use all available coal. Jevons filled his book with detailed analyses of coal mines showing mine by mine the estimated amount of coal remaining, the annual consumption of that coal (depletion ratio), and the duration of the supply. He anticipated with uncanny precision the bell-shaped curve that in the next section of this chapter we will see was typical of M. King Hubbert’s 1950s peak oil graphs. In his despair that the U.K. would soon run out of energy, Jevons further concluded (obviously incorrectly) that there was no chance oil would be an alternative resource able to solve the running-out-of-coal problem.

“What happened to Great Britain in 1865?” Simon asked. “Because of the perceived future need for coal and because of the potential profit in meeting that need, prospectors searched out new deposits of coal, investors discovered better ways to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for The Truth About Energy
• Also by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Marc Morano
• Introduction: The Twenty-First Century “Save the Earth” Climate Delusion
• PART I: The Politics of Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change
• PART II: The Science of Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change
• PART III: The Economics of Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change
• Conclusion: Quo Vadimus? (Where Are We Going?)
• Endnotes