Ed. note: This three-part post series (Part II: Coal Issues tomorrow; Part III: Federal Lands Potention on Friday) is taken from testimony presented by Mary J. Hutzler on February 5, 2013, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Committee on Energy and Commerce. The hearing was titled: American Energy Security and Innovation: An Assessment of North America’s Energy Resources. A summary of her remarks is here.
The United States has vast resources of oil, natural gas, and coal. In just a few short years, a forty-year paradigm that the U.S. was energy poor has been reversed. The world’s mineral-energy resource base is enlarging, not depleting–and leading the way is the U.S. with private firms exploring and producing from private lands.
In December 2011, IER published a report entitled North American Energy Inventory that provides the magnitude of these resources for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.…
Continue Reading“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions … adaptation to the unknown can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions…. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”
– F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76.
Stephen Chu, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), announced last week his intention to step down once a replacement is found. His 3,800-word resignation letter should be critically studied by students of energy policy and, indeed, public policy more generally.
I offer ten critical points to bear in mind as Chu’s letter is read (other points can be added in the comments section).…
Continue Reading“While we await global temperatures to start rising again, there are signs that the overall rise won’t be as fast as we have once been led to believe…. [A] future characterized by modest rather than extreme climate change elevates the role of adaptation relative to mitigation in most discussions.”
As global temperatures in 2012 further cement a modest warming rate in response to anthropogenic climate influences, the light burns ever brighter for the “lukewarmers”—those intrepid souls who accept that human activities are impacting the character of the world’s climate, but hold the opinion that, when taken together, these influences are–and will be–relatively modest.
While lukewarmers’ individual opinions of whether or how to do “something” about anthropogenic climate change vary, a future characterized by modest rather than extreme climate change elevates the role of adaptation relative to mitigation in most discussions.…
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