“In its Ahab-like focus on harpooning ExxonMobil, the BBC missed an opportunity to explore the enormous challenges involved in replacing fossil fuels. The costs of ignoring those challenges may well be tragically put on display this winter when Europeans face freezing temperatures with nothing but BBC-approved power systems to keep them warm.”

In Episodes 1 and 2 of its three-part documentary, Big Oil vs The World, the BBC succeeded only in demonstrating its own bias. Time and again, viewers were presented with only one side of a many-sided issue. Episode 3 is no exception. This episode’s main narrative is that, for years, oil companies have touted natural gas as a clean alternative to coal, but poor execution has largely offset the benefits.

Per unit of energy generated, natural gas produces about half the carbon dioxide of coal.…

Episode 1 of BBC’s Big Oil vs The World is a polished, emotional, lawyer-like brief for one side of a multi-sided, complex issue. But in the final analysis, the BBC case is long on agenda and feelings and short on facts, balance, and proper context. The documentary is slick propaganda that accuses oil companies of producing slick propaganda.

With its documentary Big Oil vs The World, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has added its voice to the chorus accusing the petroleum industry in general, and ExxonMobil in particular, of misleading the public and slowing the global response to climate change. The three-part documentary (Denial, Doubt, and Delay) was produced in cooperation with PBS, which ran its version on Frontline under the title The Power of Big Oil in April and May of this year.…

“One promising avenue for thinking about some of these issues is provided by Robert L. Bradley Jr., who, building on Sandy [Ikeda]’s work, offers his own typology of interventionist dynamics in a working paper, “Typology of Interventionist Dynamics” and the version in Humane Economics: Essays in Honor of Don Lavoie, edited by Jack High. I cannot do his framework justice in my short comment, and I urge the interested reader to review Bradley’s work on this topic in its entirety. That said, his typology offers some examples of key categories for considering different types of regulatory interventions….”

Decades ago I found myself swamped with examples of government intervention into the oil and gas market as I came to the concluding chapters of what would be later published as Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.…

“In my period at Cato (1990–present), “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’“, is probably our most important Policy Analysis in the energy/environment area. Bradley’s thorough review and analysis (60 pages, 325 footnotes) was a real pushback against the viability of ‘green’ energy in theory and practice.”

– Jerry Taylor, Senior Fellow and Director, Natural Resource Studies, Cato Institute, 2012

On the fifteenth [25th] anniversary of “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green’” (yesterday’s post), I recall, with pride, a lot of hard work that went into supplying the author with information about California’s wind and solar experience.

At the time I was working in the belly of the beast, the California Energy Commission (CEC) in Sacramento. The Commission was a major proponent of all things renewable, almost to the point of fanaticism.…