Happy Memorial Day Weekend! (Motoring to summer 2024)

Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but also drive to a better environment–your self-selected environment. And once there, grill, baby, grill.

The automobile is environmentalism-on-wheels. The open road is freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. 

The old Marathon ads said it best …a full tank of freedom. And Shell: “Let’s Go!” And Exxon: “Happy Motoring!”

Don’t worry about the anti-travel crowd who fret about emissions of the trace greening gas, carbon dioxide. Forget the spin and go for a spin!

Each year, MasterResource celebrates the beginning of the peak-driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability and reliability. There is so little to apologize for. When is the last time you got a bad tank of gasoline or diesel, anyway?…

Giberson Defines Free Market for Electricity!

“A free market in electricity is based on private property rights and voluntary exchange.”

– Michael Giberson, May 19, 2024

It’s a start. It took me a few dozen tries, but the definition has come from a (not-so) free market electricity advocate, Mike Giberson. Maybe Lynne Kiesling, woman of system and “The Queen of Electricity Markets,” will be next.

Fake free marketeers at the Niskanen Center and at R Street Institute are a plague on sound public policy analysis regarding electricity and other climate/energy issues. The sad case of Jerry Taylor of Cato and Niskanen is recounted here and here. But the problem also is with the energy specialists at R Street, including senior fellow Giberson. (See yesterday’s post on Devin Hartman, Giberson’s boss.)

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Mike Giberson knows his energy stuff and was/is free market in many areas, except for electricity.…

“Economic planning … is sound policy” (R Street’s Hartman Outs Himself)

Update: Devin Hartman of R Street has blocked some of the links below. The debate is intellectual to me and PR/political to him. If he cannot define what a free market is in electricity, then he is not being honest with himself or the community.

“The core of [FERC] Order 1920 – economic planning – is sound policy.” (Devin Hartman, R Street Institute)

“You describe yourself as ‘pro-market,’ and R Street promotes itself as free market. What gives with central electricity planning and the ‘whole-of-government’ current federal approach? (R. Bradley, below)

R Street Institute advertises itself as “Free Markets. Real Solutions.” Devin Hartman, Policy Director, Energy and Environmental Policy; Resident Senior Fellow at R Street, advertises himself as “pro-market and environmental policy scholar and advocate” and

An established thought leader in energy and environmental policy with over a decade of experience, including nearly six years of experience at three regulatory bodies.

Ad Hominem Backfire in the Energy/Climate Debate

Buzz Smith: Snake Oil EVangelism

EV Forcing: 21 Problems

Alarmism Now – and Then (Modern Malthusianism in its 6th Decade)

Global Cooling and a New Ice Age: Never Forget (humility required in science, change)

Adaptation to Heat: Then and Now

Permanent Subsidy? Industrial Wind’s PTC (14 Extensions)