In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
“Michael Shellenberger needs to go Alex Epstein. He must explain the fundamental energy concepts of density and intermittency in his political quest in the Golden State…. He must differentiate between global lukewarming and catastrophic warming from the enhanced greenhouse effect. The war on fossil fuels must end in California.”
Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress, is running for Governor of California. Energy is his major campaign issue for a state that is in energy trouble. But he must properly finish what he has started–even to the point of speaking political incorrectness to power.
“I am a lifelong Democrat and have worked for progressive causes all of my life.” So begins the “About” section of Michael Shellenberger’s website for his run for California’s governorship. A resident of Berkeley, he touts his credentials as a Progressive Democrat:
In the 2000s, I helped persuade the Obama administration to make a big investment in clean energy, won the “Green Book Award,” and was named a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” for my writings on climate change.
“In DOE’s ostensible energy efficiency zealousness, it assumes ‘command and control’ of a portion of the economy. Such political markets inevitably displace free markets, as vested interests organize and mobilize resources to protect and enlarge their abilities, against less powerful stakeholders, to determine regulatory outcomes.”
In 1999, “Is DOE Leading Us Astray?” was published in a business trade journal. That journal no longer exists, but my article’s message can be revisited to assess how the current situation.
The original is indented and in red, followed by my responses: [1]
… Continue ReadingWhen you do the math, properly accounting for the delivered efficiency of the two energy forms, one sees that electricity is delivered at an overall efficiency of 27% and natural gas is delivered at an overall efficiency of 91% (using the above illustrative EFs).
Editor Note: This completes a two-part interview of Professor Jack High, profiled yesterday. His interest in business scholarship in the classical-liberal tradition relates to important topics at MasterResource: political capitalism, contra-capitalism, and corporate cronyism.
“There is so much about business practice that is ripe for study by Austrian economics, but it is not a main focus of our present generation of scholars….. I suspect that the study of business practice is an opportunity for enterprising Austrian scholars to make a mark.” (Jack High, below)
Part III: Austrian Economics and Business History
Q. Let’s step back and talk about business history. How did Austrian (or market process) economics overlap with the study of business?
A. Austrian economics from the beginning has realized that market activity is characterized by desire for improvement, and that change is initiated and carried out by the vital few, to use Jonathon Hughes’ term.…
Continue Reading