“The greatest threat we face — which will test our country, our democracy, every single one of us — is climate change. We have one last chance to unleash the ingenuity and political will of hundreds of millions of Americans to meet this moment before it’s too late.” (Robert O’Rourke, April 29, 2019)
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was facing criticism for being all meet-and-greet but with no ideas in his first month as a presidential nominee. “The big idea? Beto doesn’t have one,” opined David Siders at Politico. But a big idea would come two weeks later, supplementing the campaigner’s standard Obama-like fare of just favoring wind, solar, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, the Clean Power Plan, and the Paris climate accord. [1]
O’Rourke was a closeted keep-it-in-the-ground, anti-fossil-fuel Progressive during his unsuccessful Texas campaign for the US Senate last year.…
Continue ReadingBack in 1996, the Cato Institute published the above two-volume treatise. Oil, Gas, and Government was the first (and still only) classical-liberal history of intervention in a major U.S. industry. I subsequently lectured on the book at Cato in Washington, DC and at a few other locals.
I recently ran across the outline/major points of my presentation, which I share below for those interested in the historical sweep of oil and gas regulation, tax policy, government ownership, and public grants.
To understand the perils of interventionism (particularly price controls and wartime planning), I document the coordination and problem solving in exploration/production, transmission/transportation, refining, and distribution/marketing. (Electricity, a separate energy industry, was not covered in the book.)
“Government Intervention in U.S. Oil and Gas Markets: Searching for ‘Market Failure’” (Synopsis of Major Themes of Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S.…
Continue ReadingThe Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (2005) is amending its interconnection regulations to require public utilities to follow special rules to interconnect wind energy facilities. Wind energy is allowed to behave differently, while other kinds of electricity generation continue to act according to the old rules designed to protect the reliability of the electrical grid.
– Tom Tanton, Distorting the Wealth of Nature, PERC, September 1, 2005.
Having only entered the fray over electricity system regulation and markets in 2007, I have little context or detail for the above quotation, which appears at the end of the first section of the referenced article.
But I know enough about regulation to know that “special rules” means propping up the wind energy relative to its more concentrated, dispatchable competitors on the electricity grid.…
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