“Today, many governments give special treatment to a favored few businesses that eagerly accept those favors. This is the essence of cronyism…. One obvious example of this involves wind farms. Most cannot turn a profit without the costly subsidies the government provides.”
– Charles G. Koch, “The Importance of Economic Freedom.” August 17, 2012.
William Simon, the top energy regulator in the Nixon’s Federal Energy Administration, was surprised. Oil company head after head was visiting his office to demand this or that to alleviate their shortages of oil or get more entitlements credit for their refineries. But Koch Industries had come by to just ask the federal government to leave them alone—to allow price signals to allocate crude oil and petroleum products. It was a meeting that Simon would not forget.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: Part I yesterday described Ken Green’s current responsibilities at the Fraser Institute and Canadian energy/environmental issues. Today’s post covers Green’s early interest, education, and career in environmentalism.]
MR: When did you first become interested in environmental science?
KG: I was always interested in nature as a kid. I remember catching frogs at a nearby golf course when I was 5, and I grew up in California camping in the various state parks, where I was always interested in catching critters and playing with them. Lizards, horned toads, snakes, small rodents, whatever I could catch. I also loved science, and remember the name of my 6th grade science teacher, Mr. Jahn, who made studying science fun.
I used to go out to the Mojave Desert a lot with my mother, who was a real character.…
Continue Reading[Editor’s note: From time to time MasterResource will interview leading scholars in the free-market energy and environmental tradition. This is our first interview.]
MR: Ken, describe your current position at the Fraser Institute in Canada.
KG: I am Senior Director of Fraser’s Centre for Natural Resources, which studies public policy involving natural resource management. Primarily, we study mining and energy policy, but there are elements of environmental and even agricultural policy that fall under the aegis of my Center.
MR: What is the mission of Fraser?
KG: The informal way I describe our mission is that we study public policy and educate Canadians (and global audiences as well) about the impact that public policy choices have on people’s lives.
Those impacts might be at the level of the individual, where people want to see how schools rank in order to pick a school for their children; the impacts might be at the household level where we show people what a proposed or existing public policy might cost their household on an annual basis; they might be the effects a policy will have on their provincial competitiveness or fiscal stability; and it might be at the global level where we rank the countries of the world on economic freedom, or the hospitality of global jurisdictions to mining investment.…
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