A few years back a YouTube video of the comedian Louis CK went viral on the internet. Speaking on the Conan O’Brien show, CK called on people to reawaken their sense of wonder at the unprecedented technological marvels of the modern world:

We live in an amazing amazing world… Everybody on every plane should constantly be going “oh my God! Wow!” You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. People say there’s delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours. It used to take 30 years.

Robert Bryce’s Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, published this month by Public Affairs, does not feature Louis CK’s comic rant, which is too bad, as the book is in many ways an extended reflection on the same theme.…

“When I attend NARUC meetings and other topical meetings, I am absolutely astounded by the number of rent-seeking non-profit organizations that are advocating for changes to shape the electric industry in ways that accommodate their interests (where do they get all that funding?).

Not all of them are wrong! But most assuredly, many of them are!”

The electricity regulatory framework is broken.

The long list of market distorting policy includes subsidies, mandates, mispricing, costly but ineffective regulations, entry restrictions, political vs. evidence based decision-making, social vs. market emphasis, and just plain anti-market bias. Add to this a gaggle of well-financed crony capitalists that can attend endless meetings to advocate for more of these misguided efforts.

The myriad reforms, just another layer of politicization, will take us even further from an economically coherent electric services industry to one that is full of command and control.…

“The distinction between renewable and non-renewable resources is tenuous and perhaps in the last analysis untenable.”

– M. A. Adelman, The Economics of Petroleum Supply (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 66.

M. A. Adelman, profiled yesterday, was an empirically driven energy economist. He was not a Malthusian because the data suggested otherwise. He found with petroleum what Julian Simon found in the the family of mineral resources.

Adelman’s writings richly describe the way to understand the paradox of expanding depletable resources. He emphasized that oil was a fungible, global commodity, and improving knowledge can overcome diminishing returns in different regions and certainly globally.

And Adelman captured a point that Alex Epstein today stresses: that oil is not a ‘natural resource’ but a man-made one, from finding the treasure in the ground to refining the raw material into useful human products to transporting the inputs to delivering the outputs to points of human consumption.…

“But for all of the jousting here at home over natural gas exports and the virtues (or lack thereof) of renewable energy, the global energy story of today is coal.”

The shale revolution has fundamentally changed the American energy scene. Over the last five years or so, domestic production of oil and gas have soared. And some analysts are claiming that the US oil production could soon surpass that of Saudi Arabia.

As the shale gale rumbles forward, the usual battles over renewable energy are continuing. At the state level, policymakers and lobby groups continue tussling over renewable portfolio standards. At the federal level, the White House continues its mindless support for the corn ethanol scam and Congress continues debating subsidies for wind and solar.

But for all of the jousting here at home over natural gas exports and the virtues (or lack thereof) of renewable energy, the global energy story of today is coal.…