Open international borders create mutually beneficial trading relationships that promote peace and prosperity. Tariffs, quotas, and other forms of protectionism and nationalism create conflict and lower living standards for all.
In our imperfect world of state-owned energy companies, some being U.S. foes, the imperative is policy reform toward private property rights, market exchange, and the rule of law. This is the real sustainability issue, not the exaggerated issue of anthropogenic climate change from carbon-based energy usage.
Private ownership of the subsoil, and privately owned energy infrastructure otherwise, would create wealth compared to the current system of political elitism. Private, dispersed wealth, such as initially assigning mineral rights to surface owners, such as proposed by Guillermo Yeatts, whose views are summarized in my post, “‘Theft of the Subsoil’: Guillermo Yeatts on Latin/South America mineral-rights reform,” would increase personal power and civil society, while reducing state power.…
“As currently drafted, the carbon emission rates that EPA proposes for Virginia are arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.”
“Virginia’s compliance with the Proposed Regulation, as currently drafted, will be expensive and will be paid for by Virginia residents and businesses. Contrary to the claim that ‘rates will go up, but bills will go down’, experience and costs in Virginia make it extremely unlikely that either electric rates or bills in Virginia will go down as a result of the Proposed Regulation.”
“Additional near-term generator retirements caused by the Proposed Regulation will compound existing, unresolved reliability concerns in the Commonwealth.”
– Staff of the Virginia State Corporation Commission, Comments to U.S. EPA, October 14, 2014.
The anti-intellectual, postmodernist arguments for free-lunch/lunch-you-are-paid-to-eat CO2-emission reductions regulation, or in the U.S. EPA’s words, “‘rates will go up, but bills will go down,” sooner or later must hit the shoals of reality.…
“Each year, the Progressive Policy Institute publishes its list of ‘investment heroes’ – non-financial companies that are investing the most in the U.S. economy. Of the 25 companies that make up the Institute’s ‘investment heroes’ list this year, 10 are involved to some degree in the exploration and production of oil and natural gas or involved in energy distribution and power.”
“For decades now, the United States has pursued energy policies based on the fear of scarcity. The thinking in Washington, D.C. – and even at some energy companies – was that reviving domestic energy production was a dream…. Now, we need energy policies that are designed for this new era of abundance.”
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson recently addressed the Greater Houston Partnership on the State of Energy. He paid homage to Houston, where ExxonMobil’s far flung operations are about to be brought together at one campus.…