“[Philip] Mango told FERC staff he planned to ‘[d]o this for just a couple of years, make a bunch of money to put kids through school and do all those things, and no one’s hurt’ …. Ketchup Caddy [was] a corporate entity that Mango had created to sell an in-car ketchup holder he invented….” (Utility Drive, below)

Why do the worst often get on top where political entrepreneurship replaces market entrepreneurship? Why does regulation invite gaming where (at best) entrepreneurship is superfluous?

Consider the 1970s oil trading boom, where price-controlled oil was bid up to market levels without any value-added. Robert Sutton, a former trunk salesman, became a regulatory millionaire on that one.

Remember Enron’s gaming of the California hyper-regulated electricity market in 2000/2001? Three authors wrote in Business History Review:

Enron’s traders used their knowledge of the newly designed markets to artificially increase or decrease wholesale prices in their favor, which often involved submitting false supply-and-demand information, withholding available electricity, or scheduling energy they did not have.

“I don’t agree with many (any?) of [Alex Epstein’s] points in his response, and it is conspicuously lacking in arguments about climate itself.”  Tyler Cowen

“It’s sad that a guy as smart as Tyler not only 1) irresponsibly commented on a book he was not willing to read carefully, but also 2) refused to admit any wrongdoing whatsoever.” Alex Epstein

It was distributed on social media by the director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s loan programs office, Jigar Shah, described as “The man in charge of how the US spends $400bn to shift away from fossil fuels.” Shah forwarded Tyler Cowen’s post (at Marginal Revolution) critiquing Alex Epstein’s book, Fossil Future: Why Human Flourishing Requires Using More Oil, Gas, and Coal–Not Less.

A ‘classical liberal’ handing an intellectual gift to a DOE grifter?…

Ed. Note: The news about nuclear is not good, which has been true for the last 70 years. Kennedy Maize at the Quad Report has the latest.

Holtec Decommissioning Scandal (800 MW Palisades)

New Jersey-based Holtec International on January 30th  agreed to pay its home state a $5 million fine in order to avoid criminal prosecution for falsifying documents related to a 2018 state-awarded tax break program.

The development in New Jersey could scuttle widespread rumors, most likely spread by Holtec, that the U.S. Department of Energy is about to loan the company $1.5 billion for its project to recommission the shuttered 800-MW Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. Bloomberg first reported the rumor, commenting that the DOE loan would be “the latest sign of strengthening federal government support for the atomic industry.”…

“… your argument appears to rely on the same tactic you disparage in others: ‘the selective emphasis of certain facts that bolster their stance’…. You omit the abundant and vital array of studies…. You’re also way out of date.” – Andy Revkin to Dessler (below)

Last summer/fall was supposed to be another hurricane season of note, according to climate scientist/alarmist/activist Andrew Dessler. On June 12, 2023, he wrote in “Climate change is making hurricanes more destructive” (Substack):

Because hurricanes are one of the big-ticket weather disasters that humanity has to face, climate misinformers spend a lot of effort muddying the waters on whether climate change is making hurricanes more damaging. With the official start to the 2023 hurricane season in the North Atlantic on June 1, I figured it was time to explain why we can be so confident that hurricanes are indeed more destructive today due to climate change….