But as the great economist Julian Simon often pointed out, resources are manmade, not natural. Jed Clampett cheered when he found oil on his land because it made him rich enough to move to Beverly Hills. But his great-grandfather would have cursed the disgusting black gunk because Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner hadn't yet discovered that kerosene could be distilled from it.

President Bush chides us for our "addiction to oil." But under current conditions, using oil makes perfect sense. Someday, if we let the free market operate, someone will find an energy source that works better than oil. Then richer future generations won't need oil. So why deprive ourselves and make ourselves poorer with needless regulation now?

Anyway, it's not as if we're running out of oil. That's one of the myths I expose in my new book, "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity". If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, entrepreneurs will find better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At $50 a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

The precautionary principle, popular in Europe, is the idea that no new thing should be permitted until it has been proved harmless. Sounds good, except as Ron Bailey of Reason writes, it basically means, "Don't ever do anything for the first time."

Stakeholder participation means that busybodies would be permitted to intrude on private transactions. Semmens's example is DDT, which for years would have saved children from deadly malaria, except that "'stakeholders' from the environmental quarter have prevailed on governments to ban the trade in this product."

The first victims of these principles are the poor. We rich Westerners can withstand a lot of policy foolishness. But people in the developing world live on the edge, so anything that retards economic progress -- including measures to arrest global warming -- will bring incredible hardship to the most vulnerable on the planet.

If we care about human life, we should celebrate Economic Progress Day.