“[P]ermanence and stability are the cardinal virtues of the legal rules that make private innovation and public progress possible. To my mind there is no doubt that a legal regime that embraced private property and freedom of contract is the only one that in practice can offer that permanence and stability.”

– Richard Epstein. Simple Rules for a Complex World,  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2004, p. x1.

In U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure–and in a recent blog post at MasterResource–I have argued that for government energy policy to be effective it has to be modest—modest especially in what policy can be expected to accomplish.

But for modest policy to be effective, there must be some basic understandings about what energy policy should or should not entail.…

“For more than 60 years, TransCanada has been a leader in the safe and reliable operation of North American energy infrastructure, including a vast array of natural gas and oil pipelines, along with natural gas storage facilities and nuclear, wind, hydro and solar power-generation facilities”  (TransCanada).

“It’s our commitment to you that the Keystone XL pipeline will be the safest pipeline ever built.”

It’s good to have reality on your side. The Keystone XL pipeline has a ready builder and ready customers. It employs state-of-the-art technology. It integrates North America. It transports a precious energy. It is modern transportation to make modern petroleum products for an energy hungry world.

Like the Shell commercial says, Let’s Go!

TransCanada in its series, Just the Facts, recently presented this analysis regarding three key issues: spill response, emergency response, and pipeline integrity.…

“It’s policy, it’s regulation, it’s industry structure and it’s incentives . . . It’s not physics, it’s not chemistry, it’s not even the electric grid. It’s what we decide we want.” – Ron Binz

“Postmodernism … can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

A small victory for consumers and free-market energy policy came yesterday when energy statist Ron Binz withdrew as a nominee to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in Washington, D.C.

Binz put the blame on others rather than his own postmodern energy philosophy and coercive energy-policy views, which he unsuccessfully tried to hide before Congress.…

[This MasterResource post from February 2011 is reprinted for its relevance with the start of ObamaCare today. An uncomfortable question must be asked: what will happen in the health waiting rooms given what happened in the 1970s gasoline lines?]

For decades I have enjoyed the opinion-page editorials of the Wall Street Journal, both the unsigned editorials and the guest opinions. During the 1970s energy crisis, and today amid climate alarmism and the futile crusade to regulate carbon dioxide, the Journal has been a bastion of sound economic thought.

I was recently reminded of perhaps my favorite WSJ energy editorial of all, “Buffer of Civility,” published during the dark days of energy rioting in summer 1979 (yes, the U.S. experienced fuel riots from federal price controls that caused energy shortages).

What brought this to mind was another WSJ editorial, “Sebelius’s Price Controls,” which reported on a 136-page price-regulating rule under ObamaCare–and this message to state governors from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

urging them “to prevent unjustified and excessive health insurance premium growth.”