“Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.”

— A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Last month, The Economist magazine conducted a two-week Oxford style online debate over the proposition “that subsidizing renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.”

“Renewable” in the case is really politically correct renewables: basically wind power, with some solar and a bit of of biofuel/geothermal thrown in.

Matthias Fripp, a research fellow for the Environmental Change Institute and Oxford’s Exeter College, defended the motion, while Robert L. Bradley Jr., founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, argued against. Three comments by Jeremy Carl , Travis Bradford , and Ben Goldsmith each played to the premise that government energy policy had to displace fossil fuels.…

It is perhaps the most revealing ‘crony capitalism’ memo in American history–at least that is in the public domain. (I ask others to submit nominations for this (dis)honor to see if this memo does not take the prize.)

It was written from Kyoto, Japan in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano. The global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). Palmisano’s memo reflects that as well as the specific benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron.

Parenthetically, I was lucky to have received this memo back at Enron to share it with posterity. Palmisano had me in the “To” list but but purposefully did not email it to me (we were foes on ‘green’ energy issues).…

[This exploration into the theory of regulation was inspired by the role of the mixed economy in the rise and fall of Enron. The analysis applies to many current issues, such as the negative environmental effects of the supply/demand for used batteries, the lead story in today’s New York Times.] 

Political economists have long recognized the challenge of getting regulation right in a mixed economy.

“A scheme of state interference for the attainment of some social or economic benefit,” stated Hubert Smith back in 1887, “will in general succeed or fail according as it is able or unable to cause a change in the nature, habits, and disposition of those whom it affects.”

A century later, regulatory economist Sanford Ikeda reached a like conclusion:

Interventionism is really a process of entrepreneurial adjustments in both the private and public sectors, where these adjustments tend to be both unanticipated and undesirable (from the viewpoint of the interveners) owing to radical ignorance, complexity, and dispersed information.

“Human beings create more than they destroy.”

– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 580.

“People have since antiquity worried about running out of natural resources–flint, game animals, what-have-you. Yet, amazingly, all the historical evidence shows that raw materials–all of them–have become less scarce rather than more….  And there is no reason why this trend should not continue forever.”

– Julian Simon, “The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving,” Cato Policy Report, September/October 1995.

There is only one thing that is going up more than government subsidies for uneconomic wind and solar power: oil, gas, and coal reserves and resources in the United States, according to a new study released yesterday by the Institute for Energy Research (IER) assessing total North American inventory.…