Articles on this blog have consistently made the point that shale gas in the U.S. represents an unprecedented pathway to abundant, low-cost, clean energy supplies. In previous posts it was noted that unconventional gas resources, combined with new production technologies, could potentially break the global oil-natural gas price bond, just as has happened in the U.S.
Shale gas is now subject to active exploration in England, Australia, Poland, Ukraine, China, India, and to a lesser extent, South America. Canada has already moved to the development stage with its shale formations in British Columbia (Montney and Horn River). Mexico shares the prolific Eagle Ford shale formation with Texas, but its state-owned PEMEX has done little to develop that resource yet.
Other nations have rejected the gift of unconventional gas. Romania and Bulgaria, both heavily dependent on Russian gas, have said “no” to shale gas production, as has France.…
“The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a decision affirming EPA’s first round of greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations in all respects.”
Last year, I outlined the case being made against the EPA’s issuance of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions regulations. The case was being brought before the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by a group of petitioners which have become collectively known as the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, and made up of large number of businesses, business associations and several states. The petitioners argued on several different grounds that the EPA was wrong in the way that it determined that GHGs were an endangerment to the public health and welfare as well as in the manner in which it was going about issuing regulations.
Earlier this week, the Court handed down its decision—a unanimous finding in support of the EPA on virtually all counts.…
In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’
Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?
F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”
…If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.