Throughout his academic career Singer wrote frequently in the mainstream press, including "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", and "Wall Street Journal", often striking up positions disputing mainstream thinking. His overall position was one of distrust of federal regulations and a strong belief in the efficacy of the free market. He believed in what Rachel White Scheuering calls "free market environmentalism": that market principles and incentives should be sufficient to lead to the protection of the environment and conservation of resources. Regular themes in his articles have been energy, oil embargoes, OPEC, Iran, and rising prices. Throughout the 1970s, for example, he downplayed the idea of an energy crisis and said it was largely a media event. In several papers in the 1990s and 2000s he struck up other positions against the mainstream, questioning the link between UV-B and melanoma rates, and that between CFCs and stratospheric ozone loss.