“I have made it clear in this campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil, on natural gas, or anything else. I am calling for tax cuts to stimulate the production of new sources of domestic energy and new technologies to improve efficiency.”
– Al Gore (2000)
“As long as I’m President, we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people. We don’t have to choose between one or the other, we can do both.”
– Barack Obama (2012)
For a very brief moment early in his first term, President Obama played the pro-oil card for some political mileage. Gasoline prices were on the rise, and Obama wanted to be all-things-to-all-people. …
Continue Reading“… consider why the United States has decided to encourage people to buy electric vehicles: It’s a new technology….”
– Samantha Page, “A Koch front group is putting out misleading attack ads on electric vehicles,” ThinkProgress, July 28, 2017.
“No electric car since 1902, regardless of battery or drive train, had been able to compete effectively against its contemporary internal combustion counterpart.”
– David Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and The Burden of History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 203.
“When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in a free market, consumers pick winners to leave the losers for government.”
– R. Bradley, Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust, September 26, 2012.
The energy past is important–and far too few journalists and advocates in the energy-policy area know their history.…
Continue Reading“Mr. Sherman knew that Alger was interested in the Diamond Match company to a large degree, and the purpose of the original anti-trust bill introduced by the Ohio financier, as I am positively informed by a senator who was then close to Mr. Sherman, was to punish Alger for his action in the national convention a few months before.”
Antitrust law has been more active in the petroleum industry than for any other area of the US economy, both before and after the passage of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Chapter 26 of my Oil, Gas, and Government: The US Experience (Cato Institute: 1996) described the legislative history of state and federal antitrust law in the U.S., before examining case law in oil and gas.
In my research, the libertarian economist and historian Murray Rothbard alerted me to a peculiarity in the origin of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.…
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