Political Economy 101 (Watch the Republicans Closely)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- November 5, 2014

“… the very principle of constitutional government requires it to be assumed, that political power will be abused to promote the particular purposes of the holder; not because it always is so, but because such is the natural tendency of things….”

– J. S. Mill (1861) [1]

The shifts in Congress toward Republicans in yesterday’s elections can be taken as a referendum by voters for less government and more freedom and prosperity. Yet Establishment Republicans have aided the growth of government mightily, and Cronyism is entrenched on both sides of the aisle.

Will the new Republican leadership, for example, extend the Production Tax Credit to help keep Obama energy policy alive? Or will they say, enough and enough with the repeated extensions from the 1992 massive tax break. (“After 22-years of tax credits, the business of big wind is no longer about energy production,” noted Lisa Linowes.…

Halloween Thoughts from Obama’s Science Advisor

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 31, 2014

“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich[1]

Doom and gloom—and falsity—hallmarks the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s initial and still science advisor. Halloween Holdren has been quiet with the outlandish in recent years–he does not want to embarrass his boss–but his many quotations beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!

Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…

“Voltage Collapse and Blackout Conditions”: EPA’s Power Plant Rule Trashed by SPP

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 28, 2014

“As a result of the assumed EPA retirements with no resource additions, the SPP network was so severely stressed by large reactive deficiencies that the software used in the analysis was unable to produce meaningful results, which is generally indicative of voltage collapse and blackout conditions.”

– Southwest Power Pool, “Reliability Impact Assessment of the EPA’s Proposed Clean Power Plan,” October 8, 2014.

The states and their multistate organizations are weighting in against the Obama administration’s proposed new regulations aimed at reducing emissions from existing electric powerplants 30 percent from their 2005 levels by 2030. They are doing the math, and both cost and reliability are computing negatively.

Last week, MasterResource highlighted pushback from the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which stated: “As currently drafted, the carbon emission rates that EPA proposes for Virginia are arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.…