Ed. Note: This tribute to the four leading professors among oil and gas law pioneers in academia was presented by the late Joseph W. Morris (obituary below) in 2001. It is reprinted in appreciation of private property rights to the subsoil that has set the U.S. apart from most of the rest of the world.
I bring you four academicians.
He was born in Kingman, Indiana in 1888 and died in 1963. He took his Baccalaureate Degree and his first law degree from the University of Indiana in 1911 and a J.D. Degree from Yale in 1912. He briefly practiced law and then became a Professor of Law at the Universities of Florida and Kentucky and in 1920, joined the faculty of law at the University of Illinois.…
“[Philip] Mango told FERC staff he planned to ‘[d]o this for just a couple of years, make a bunch of money to put kids through school and do all those things, and no one’s hurt’ …. Ketchup Caddy [was] a corporate entity that Mango had created to sell an in-car ketchup holder he invented….” (Utility Drive, below)
Why do the worst often get on top where political entrepreneurship replaces market entrepreneurship? Why does regulation invite gaming where (at best) entrepreneurship is superfluous?
Consider the 1970s oil trading boom, where price-controlled oil was bid up to market levels without any value-added. Robert Sutton, a former trunk salesman, became a regulatory millionaire on that one.
Remember Enron’s gaming of the California hyper-regulated electricity market in 2000/2001? Three authors wrote in Business History Review:
…Enron’s traders used their knowledge of the newly designed markets to artificially increase or decrease wholesale prices in their favor, which often involved submitting false supply-and-demand information, withholding available electricity, or scheduling energy they did not have.
“I’ve been around automotive for a long time, but I’ve NEVER seen incentives that represent 90% of new vehicle price. For a Toyota, 10% is the most I’ve seen. Yet, this is exactly what’s happening for the Toyota Mirai.” (James Carter, below)
EVs compete against hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles–at least in California where some one hundred hydrogen dispensing stations are. The range and fill-time of HFCVs is quite competitive with EVs. But it is downhill from there–and a major mess for sellers and buyers. The California Energy Commission (remember Methanol?) has failed again.
Consultant James Carter on LinkedIn summarized a recent article in Jalopnik, by Logan Carter, Toyota Offers $40,000 Discount On A Car Most People Can’t Fuel Up.” His autopsy (verbatim):