Ed note: The extract below from a Joint Economic Committee Staff Report briefly describes the end of oil price and allocation regulation in 1981, righting one of the worst energy fiascos in U.S. history. This experience has taken price controls off the political table ever since with petroleum, including today with the Iran War. [“President Reagan’s Economic Legacy,” Section C: Energy Shortages and Regulatory Failures]
In the 1970s, OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was temporarily successful in driving up energy prices and hitting consumer wallets worldwide. OPEC’s manipulations of oil supplies were turned into a full-scale energy crisis in the United States because of price controls in energy markets.
Rising oil prices hurt consumers, but long lines at gas stations and shortages of heating oil were the work of bad policy, not of markets.…
Continue Reading“Many [green] philanthropists who are willing to step up are looking around and saying, ‘DOE is stepping back and Catalyst doesn’t exist. I can’t solve this on my own.’” – Lara Pierpoint, Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition (below)
For decades, energy realists have explained why the stock energy created by the sun — fossil fuels — are inherently more economical than the dilute, intermittent flow from the sun. The concept of energy density has been explained ceaselessly in articles and books by Vaclav Smil. Political Economy 101 — markets pick winners, leaving losers for government — also comes into play as experimental technologies enabled by special government favor face the political winds of change.
Evidence? Start with the recent demise of the rooftop solar industry and the EV industry here in the U.S.…
Continue Reading“The global climate elite are scrambling for relevancy and power. The poll-conscious wind and solar lobbies are disingenuously pitching affordability. And the climate zealots are getting nutty. Energy reality bats last.”
Let history note that the United States has issued a notice to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), effective February 27, 2026. This withdrawal is broader than the previously announced (and started) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. The UNFCCC is the governing global network behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “consensus” science (based on subjective climate-model interpretation), as well as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Accord of 2015.
The one-year window is running, with formal withdrawal set for February 27, 2027. As summarized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):
… Continue ReadingIn January, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the UNFCCC.