“The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it…. [H]e seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”

– Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

A recent video is circulating where T. Boone Pickens ranted “I am the expert, not you” to land his point that falling demand, not increasing supply, is primarily behind the oil-price collapse. This outburst reminds me of the quote from the early 20^th century humorist Peter Finley Dunne: “It’s not so much what he doesn’t know that worries me, as what he does know that isn’t so.”…

“Using standard IPCC models, we take 181 mmtCO2/year and divide it by 1,767,250 mmtCO2/°C. And we get 0.0001°C/yr, that is, one ten thousandths of a degree Celsius of temperature rise from the Canadian tar sands oil delivered by the Keystone XL pipeline each year.”

It’s hard to come up with things to say about the Keystone XL pipeline that haven’t been said many times before. Consequently, everyone from the President on down to the protestors, with industry, analysts and Congress in between, keeps on repeating the same things.

The facts haven’t changed in the six plus years that TransCanada’s proposal to build a pipeline to transport Alberta tar sands to refineries in the Gulf Coast was first officially proposed to the U.S. Department of State. The impact on permanent (not temporary!)…

Editor note: Yesterday’s post summarized The American Energy Renaissance Act of 2014, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) and Representative  Jim Bridenstine (R-Ok) last year. Today’s post summarizes a model bill authored by the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance several years ago. The logic of free-market policy does not change but becomes stronger with time and change. But judge for yourself–and add (in comments) any suggestions you might have.

The Obama Administration has been implementing an anti-energy agenda since becoming President. For the last six years, Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” has worked to increase the cost of traditional energy to reduce usage and try to make uneconomic consumer-rejected energy (wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles) more economic.

Even before Obama, multiple-hundred-page interventionist legislation has been signed time and again by Republican presidents.…

“The war on carbon energy, the carbon tax, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs, and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity. Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia.”

Progress on Climate Policy has been made in Australia with the repeal of the carbon tax, closure of the Climate Commission, and increasing skepticism about climate alarmism and related energy-market interventions. President Obama, beholden to radical U.S. greens, even took a shot at Australia’s climate pivot during his trip to the country last month, generating negative reactions from many Australians.

Nonetheless, ‘green’ policy in Australia has caused a good deal of industrial damage and business uncertainty that must be reversed with a full government commitment to climate realism and rational energy policy.…