“Some molecules are painted with a no export sign. Other molecules are painted with the OK to export sign, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some molecules are OK and some aren’t.”

– Rusty Braziel, RBN Energy LLC, quoted in “Crude export ban no match for lightest U.S. shale oil,” Fuel Fix, February 26, 2013.

“It’s not often you get to participate in a paradigm shift in an industry, and I think we are doing that now.”

– Anders Ekvall (Shell LNG), quoted in Harry Weber, “Natural Gas Industry Expects Big Things,” Houston Chronicle, April 20, 2013.

At the LNG 17 mega-conference in Houston last week, more than 5,000 industry professionals from 80+ countries, and thousands more visitors enjoying 200,000 square feet of exhibits, plotted to make natural gas a global commodity not unlike oil.…

“Nothing in the Clean Air Act says EPA needs to promulgate any of these rules. But nothing says it can’t do so. It’s largely discretionary, and this Administration is determined to ‘interpret’ the science and use its executive authority to restrict and penalize hydrocarbon use – and ‘fundamentally transform’ America.”

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations (Heritage Foundation: forthcoming). Many will bring few health or environmental benefits but impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the Administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon (aka anti-industrial-growth) agenda.

The Heritage Foundation has calculated that his EPA’s twenty “major” rulemaking decisions (costing $100 million or more annually) alone could cost the United States over $36 billion per year.

Cleaning Up Clean

The latest example involves a third layer (or tier) of rules that the agency says will clean the nation’s air and save lives, by forcing refineries to remove more sulfur and other impurities from gasoline.…

“The energy boom in North America demonstrates that competition and technology are powerful forces; indeed, markets work. When the price system is allowed to work, technology is brought to bear on supply (more) and demand (less) to the benefit of economies everywhere.”

Gone are the days of growing scarcity in the North American oil patch–and increasing petroleum imports from unstable regimes overseas.

The new consensus–that North American energy is plentiful and will remain so to at least the year 2040–is not based on hopes and hype. Over the last five years North America has experienced a true energy revolution, and it is continuing apace.

U.S. oil production is at its highest level since 1992, at over 7 million barrels per day (mmb/d), and Canada’s output exceeded 4 mmb/d at the end of last year, its highest level ever.…

What’s the Sierra Club’s position on the development and use of natural gas from shale? Depends on whom you ask . . . within the actual organization.

By now, of course, we’re all well aware of the Sierra Club’s newly staked-out position in opposition to natural gas, notwithstanding the fact that the Club used to support it.

With its “Beyond Natural Gas” campaign, the Sierra Club now proclaims (without even a shred of irony) that natural gas is “environmentally damaging and harms public health.” Yet empirical evidence–even studies commissioned by none other than the Sierra Club itself–shows the opposite is true (also see here, here, and here).

But no one ever accused the Sierra Club of being constrained by novelties such as consistency, accuracy, or metaphysics.…