When it comes to energy, T. Boone Pickens esteems government planning. When asked about President Obama’s recent proposal for an Energy Security Trust, Pickens responded:

That starts to talk about a plan. He’s going to fund something to start something…. Make a plan … and do something different.

And low and behold, Pickens is crusading with yet another energy plan, his third in the last six years. As before, his animus is against Big Oil (see Appendix) and his fondness for personal dollars.

Pickens Plan III proposes that the federal government sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to jump-start the costly transition from oil to natural gas to fuel transportation. We don’t know the details yet, but T. Boone in March began pushing his new plan in the national media and local press.…

The Fraser Institute recently published a study examining the impacts of green energy policies inOntario,Canada. The summary of the study, which was written by Fraser Institute Senior Fellow Ross McKitrick, is below.

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The Ontario Green Energy and Green Economy Act (herein the GEA) was passed in May 2009 with the purpose of addressing environmental concerns and promoting economic growth inOntario. Its centerpiece is a schedule of subsidized electricity purchase contracts called Feed-in-Tariffs (FITs) that pro­vide long-term guarantees of above-market rates for power generated by wind turbine farms, solar panel installations, bio-energy plants and small hydroelec­tric generators. Development of these power sources was motivated in part by a stated goal of closing the Lambton and Nanticoke coal-fired power plants.

This report investigates the effect of the GEA on economic competi­tiveness in Ontario.…

[Ed. note: Dr. Grossman is author of the just-released U.S. Energy Policy and the Pursuit of Failure, an important and sobering tome with much insight about today’s debate.]

The U.S. government has claimed over the years one and one reason only for government intrusion into markets: Market failure. As a Carter administration document put it:

The first assumption for any commercialization activity by the government is that the market either has failed or will fail to make the optimum choice … [and] that the government policy maker can make a better selection than can the market.

Every administration has reiterated something like this. The Clinton administration made the point that the government needed to get involved in creating an 80-miles-per-gallon “supercar” because as the president claimed, “[T]here are a lot of things that we need to be working on that market forces alone can’t do.”…

When E. O. Wilson said “people would rather believe than know,” he perfectly summed up the state of modern environmentalism. For the fact is that the movement has been radicalized to such an extent that its policies are now characterized by senseless agendas better described as anti-science, anti-business and even anti-human; not pro-environment. [1]

Environmentalism’s gradual shift to extremism didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen on its own; the movement was led astray by the green lobby – the conglomerate of NGOs, advocacy organizations and political groups who use environmental motives to enact legislation favorable to their own goals. Today, the green lobby is a dominant force in the political sphere, despite few voters choosing to elect ‘green’ politicians.

Much of the green lobby’s success is directly attributable to its ability to demonize and brand opponents as heretics, even if their arguments are based on verifiable evidence or if they simply want to promote intelligent discussion.…