The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has been a consistent voice for classical liberalism in energy and climate for several decades. CEI stays scholarly on the intellectual front (thank Marlo Lewis et al.) and activist on the policy front. The latest from the lean, pound-for-pound, heavy hitting think tank (letter of August 16, 2023) follows:
Dear Members of Congress:
On the first anniversary of enactment of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the undersigned organizations strongly urge you to ensure that the IRA’s Green New Deal-type policies quickly come to an end.
We recognize that in the next year complete repeal of the IRA’s harmful energy and environmental provisions is unlikely. However, clear and tangible legislative changes that make genuine progress towards that goal are realistic and expected.
IRA proponents will today be celebrating the bill’s passage.…
“UKers have been hearing doom for a half century. Citizens want affordable, reliable energy. Many if not most know that UK sacrifice will not have any affect on climate for decades given the global coal, gas, and oil boom. Adaptation yes, but don’t exaggerate.”
It began with a “Wake Up Rishi Sunak” post from Andrew Griffiths, director of Policy & Partnerships at PlanetMark, a climate activist organization that continually complains that the UK government never does enough to mitigate greenhouse gases. Never mind that the UK accounts for about one percent of such global emissions; its oil and gas industry is mostly shut down; businesses can’t afford climate-policy-inflated bills, and consumers are falling into energy poverty…. And the plants like CO2!
“When government actually tell the general public what the climate crisis will mean for the UK, they demand government action,” Andrew begins.…
“… why doesn’t a congressional subcommittee call these companies and a few more to tell us exactly what they are up to and what is going to happen to energy prices where parties have to buy credits for something that is not a pollutant? After the meeting the company that has done the most to sell Kyoto should be awarded naming rights.”
I had a front row seat to many things energy and climate during my 16 years at Enron (1985–2001). At Political Capitalism, I described my Enron experience debating climate science and renewable policy (here).
Enron, in the words of a Greenpeace ex, was “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.” [Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War (London: Penguin Books, 1999, p.…