Twenty years ago, Rob Bradley, then president and now CEO of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), published a two-volume, two-thousand-page history of hydrocarbon regulation, legislation, economics, and politics from the mid-1800s to the mid-1980s. Titled Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience, Bradley’s treatise puts many of today’s energy issues in historical context.
On April 1, 1996, I wrote about the book in the newsletter I founded and edited, Natural Gas Week. I started my column, dubbed Perspective, by quoting philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Today, 20 years later, I would urge current legislators and regulators to consider the main takeaways of Bradley’s book before casting another vote or initialing another regulatory memo.
In his book, Bradley said that political motivations for government intervention are “narrow and self-interested, not necessarily in the common good and not necessarily representative of the citizenry.”…
Continue Reading“Our politicians should be seizing all eight of these opportunities. Instead, they are squandering them.”
Alex Epstein, who has emerged as perhaps the most important energy voice of 2016, has said:
“The 2016 election presents us with a once-in-a-lifetime energy opportunity–and energy danger. There is no middle ground. There can be no more standing down. It’s time to stand up.”
Back in January, Epstein, published an energy manifesto for this election year. In case you missed it, here are his eight policy areas with prescriptions.
1. Jump-start the American economy
Our challenge: We have been mired in recession or near-recession for a decade—and without the energy industry it would be much, much worse.
Our opportunity: The same industry that has kept us out of desperate trouble can bring us to new heights, by producing and selling energy around the world.…
Continue Reading“After this Waxman/Markey bill reached 3500 pages in length I stopped counting. Every lobbyist who could raise his arm to write a paragraph got it stapled into the bill. Legislators were paying off the people who paid them off. That’s the way our Washington politics seems to work.”
– James Hansen, “Canadian Common Sense.” May 16, 2016.
As U.S. states and foreign jurisdictions contemplate or implement cap-and-trade regimes as their preferred way to price carbon dioxide (CO2), it is good to see James Hansen raise his voice–again–on the issue. One only wishes that Hansen, the father of the global warming scare twenty-six years ago, would come out for market adaptation over cap-and-trade as his second-best option.
Hansen is upset that politicians are telling him to forget his carbon tax (fee-and-dividend) idea.…
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