Resources for the Future (RFF) was once a scholarly think tank. It did not assume but evaluated and debated mineral energy availability and wider environmental issues.

But from its glorious beginning in the 1950s and 1960s–publishing treatises on shorter studies on resource availability–RFF went Malthusian in the 1970s, a story recounted by the late mineral economist Richard Gordon and myself elsewhere. [1] A 1975 essay by John Krutilla and Talbot Page, citing helpful input from the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Wilderness Society, was long on conservationism and government intervention and short on the free market. [2]

In this case, company led to bad economics. Rather than environmental groups, RFF should have provided a home for the resource optimists rather than demote them from their ranks.

When the global warming issue first hit in the late 1980s, RFF stayed on scholarly course, proposing to study the issue rather than assume it for government activism. In his President’s Report, RFF head Robert Fri put the burden of proof where it belonged:

Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several. [3]

But with Paul Portney’s buildup of RFF in the 1990s, the temptation was too great. Assume the climate problem, don’t worry too much about dissent, much less about government failure in the attempt to address market failure. And let the private support and government grants roll in!

Ignored in all this were the studies of Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University that lower warming scenarios had benefits, not only costs, and the sign of the externality was positive (not negative” at the lower range of climate sensitivity estimates. Moreover, Mendelsohn argued that free market policies were vital to allow society’s to turn climate change (natural or anthropogenic) into a positive.

Free market adaptation, in other words, competed against government mitigation policies.

But not at RFF.

Way, Way Left

Perhaps the decision to have David Hawkins, the Director, Climate Center, Natural Resources Defense Council join RFF’s board was the canary in the coal mine for where the organization would go. In any case, Phil Sharp took RFF full Obama, and now Richard Sewell is taking RFF full anti-Trump energy/climate policy.

The grotesque partisanship now evident at RFF was signified by this blog post by Nathan Richard, visiting fellow at RFF, “Trump’s Climate Executive Order Discards American Values.” (March 28, 2017):

“America has a short list of truly shameful ‘days,’—among them the Dred Scott decision, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, and Abu Ghraib—most of them symbolic of a larger national moral failure. I hope I am wrong, but I fear that today will join that list.”

If Trump ‘s climate policy “comes to pass,” Richardson stated, “then I predict future generations will look back on today with particular scorn and shame.” And just to add certainty to his verdict, he issues the Big Scare:

“A single executive order might therefore seem unremarkable. But today’s action is significant….  At stake are the global economy, entire ecosystems, and the lives of millions—most of them not yet living. Those future generations will judge the authors of today’s policy harshly”

Ray Knop’s SCC Fundraising Letter

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[1] See Robert Bradley, Jr. Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), Appendix D (“Resources for the Future: Away from Optimism,” pp. 343–50).

[2] “Towards a Responsible Energy Policy” was depletionist [“we will be forced to rely on new domestic sources and to pay higher prices for energy in the years to come [from] … our previous policy encouraging [mineral resource] exploitation” (78)] and interventionist [“we might consider the appropriate taxation of commodities whose prices do not reflect the external or environmental cost of their production, distribution, and consumption” (87)].

[3] Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.