Ed. Note: This is Part II of an interview of Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Stephen Hicks (website here). Part I was published last week. This four-part series (Part III, Part IV to come) is the full interview (with some elaboration), from which an abbreviated version was published in KAIZEN magazine (Issue 13: August 2010) and a longer version was posted online.]
Kaizen: You began as a specialist in oil and gas regulation. How did you evolve from there to where you are now?
Bradley: There are four or so stanzas in my intellectual career to date. The first was certainly oil and gas regulation, taxation, and subsidization, the subject of my Cato book, Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience. The research for that was essentially complete by 1985 when went to the corporate world by joining HNG-InterNorth, soon to become Enron.…
[Note: Last summer, philosophy professor Stephen Hicks (website here) interviewed MasterResource founder Rob Bradley. “The Robert L. Bradley Jr. Interview, ‘Enron and Political Entrepreneurship'” covers Bradley’s intellectual career and worldview regarding the market order and energy.
This series (in four parts: Part II, Part III, Part IV) is the full interview (with some elaboration), from which an abbreviated version was published in KAIZEN magazine (Issue 13: August 2010) and a longer version was posted online.]
Introduction
Rob Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis for his last seven years there, he wrote speeches for the late Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in 2005 of fraud and conspiracy.
Bradley is also founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…
[Editor note: This post was prepared by Mary Hutzler, Dan Simmons, et al. for the Town Hall blog at the Institute for Energy Research, a free-market ‘all-energy-all-the-time’ think tank.]
“The federal government is ultimately responsible for the long-term … consistent [energy] policy…. A clean energy portfolio standard is one example of a potential policy that the administration and Congress should discuss.… In this time of fiscal austerity I propose such a standard.”
–Secretary Steven Chu
With each passing day, the odds of Congress passing a Renewable Electricity Standard grow more and more dim. But Energy Secretary Chu, Senator Graham, and others are now promoting a similar mandate under a new name. Their old vinegar/new bottle effort should be exposed and rejected as the wrong path for energy policy.
Instead of a renewable electricity mandate, Chu, Graham, et al.…