[Editor note: This (unpublished) review of “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct After All?” by Matthew R. Simmons (1943–2010) was written by Bradley in 2000.

Tomorrow, Michael Lynch will examine the Simmons’s peak-oil advocacy. A third post will described the failed bets that Simmons made with John Tierney of the New York Times and with Bradley on the average price of oil in 2010. (Simmons bet on $200 per barrel or higher averaged over 2010–and lost resoundingly.)]

Matt Simmons founded the investment banking firm Simmons & Company International soon after the 1973 energy crisis to cater to oil companies. He first stepped out in a very public way by questioning official inventory statistics for oil. But then he took a decidedly controversial turn (and one that befuddled his longtime industry friends). …

[Editor note: Dr. Giberson is an instructor and research associate at the Center for Energy Commerce at Texas Tech University’s Rawls College of Business. He blogs on energy economics and other topics at Knowledge Problem.]

On Wednesday morning, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), operating the power grid for much of the state, called upon local distribution companies to cut power to blocks of consumers on a rotating basis.

The rolling outages produced hardship for millions, and even isolated instances of severe harm. Consumers and policymakers are dissecting what went wrong and what should be done about it. The following is a preliminary analysis based on public data and news reports. A subsequent post will present more details once more complete information becomes available.

In brief, extreme cold weather pushed power demand to very high winter levels.…

[This is Part II of an interview of Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Stephen Hicks (website here). Part I was published last week.]

Kaizen: You began as a specialist in oil and gas regulation. How did you evolve from there to where you are now?

Bradley: There are four or so stanzas in my intellectual career to date. The first was certainly oil and gas regulation, taxation, and subsidization, the subject of my Cato book, Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience. The research for that was essentially complete by 1985 when went to the corporate world by joining HNG-InterNorth, soon to become Enron.

In my first years at Enron, I became conversant with the electricity market and its regulation, which was really a new area for me, a second stanza in my development.…

 “Hey America! Are you ready to get wonky on global warming? After a year that started with fallout from the “Climategate” e-mail release, saw the cap-and-trade bill die in Congress, and ended with a gang of Republican climate skeptics winning House and Senate seats, global warming experts are going back to basics.”

– Darren Samuelsohn, “Climate PR Effort Heats Up,” Politico, December 31, 2010.

And so we now know. “Environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers have renewed public relations efforts to put global warming plainly before Americans’ eyes and also rebut opponents who say nothing is happening.”

What? Nothing is happening? Who said that? Didn’t uber-alarmist James Hansen say the first rule of climate is that it changes–always has, always will. In his words:

“Climate is always changing.