“In terms of affordability, availability and scalability – methanol and ethanol are the best prospects to [displace oil in transportation] quickly.”
– John Hofmeister, quoted in John Holeywell, “Q&A: He Ran Shell Oil Co. – and He Thinks We Use Too Much Crude,” Houston Chronicle, September 19, 2014.
Milton Friedman once opined: “The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States … have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.”
Enter T. Boone Pickens, crony capitalist extraordinaire. Enter John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Co. (2005–2008), the Houston-based U.S. subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. [1]
Hofmeister maliciously titled his signature book, Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight from an Energy Insider.…
Two weeks ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a state-of-the-art climate and energy conference in the nation’s energy capital of Houston. The global warming establishment may have stayed away, but a large crowd was treated to a sound, multi-disciplinary review of the physical science, political economy, and resource economics.
The evening keynote for At The Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit was an address by Texas Governor Rick Perry. While Perry’s general public policy positions are free-market–and thus pro-consumer and pro-taxpayer–his energy security, don’t-import-but-export argument smacks of Mercantilism and U.S.-side protectionism. Furthermore, Perry pulled his punches regarding the conference’s major themes on climate and energy policy. It was a timid, uninspired keynote just when the momentum dictated going the other way.
Soft on Climate Propoganda
Perry could have, should have, reiterated the conference’s major themes: the 15–20 year ‘pause’ in global warming; lowered climate sensitivity estimates (and explanation for the same in the peer-reviewed literature); the desperate, speculative tie-in’s between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events (if there has been no warming, how can ‘climate change’ be involved?);…
“Big Green had a big impact on the U.S. Administration in the 1990s, deserving much ‘credit’ for the Kyoto cap-and-trade-with-offsets, which led to sharply accelerated global carbon emissions.“
“Most marchers tomorrow [September 21, 2014] will be liberals. The truth they must face is the fact that prescriptive liberal policies have no chance of solving the global climate problem.”
In Speaking Truth to Power—and to Friends (September 20, 2014), James Hansen continues to denigrate the efforts of the Big Green/Obama establishment to address climate change. For reasons that Hansen repeatedly stresses in his posts (regularly summarized at MasterResource), climate alarmists may wish they had more Green Party candidates to vote for next month.
Hansen and many other eco-alarmists might Go-Green-Party at the 2016 ballot box to support the climate section of the Green Party’s ecology platform:
…[W]e especially support the reduction of consumption of the world’s raw materials by the industrialized Northern Hemisphere.