“Lynne Kiesling is a technocrat whose theories come alive in the governmental domain. She believes she has melded the free market and government planning in electricity. By playing classical liberal in other respects, she has fooled many free market types, while collecting many academic positions for her contra-capitalist views.”

Statism in classical-liberal garb is the story of electricity specialist Lynne Kiesling. This post documents her exchange with Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental studies at the CATO Institute. She shows her style but avoids the fundamental arguments of markets-versus-government in electricity. My interpretation of Kiesling as contra-capitalist concludes this post.

This exchange occurred with a post by Todd Snitchler, head of the Electric Power Supply Association.

Fisher (to Kiesling): in a recent piece you attempt to reconcile designed markets with a Hayekian approach.…

“The fix is in with Doug Lewin, whose mission is the eradication of fossil fuels in power generation via the ‘virtual power plant’… Pick your term between ‘energy transformation,’ ‘deep decarbonization,’ Net Zero, Green New Deal.”

Doug Lewin, climate alarmist and PR voice for the Texas renewables industry, posts on social media with the tag line, “Growing jobs, increasing justice, and reducing pollution in Texas.” In his Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, he blamed the state’s current freeze on Global Warming (aka climate change) as follows:

Climate Impacts: We’ve Seen This Movie Before

A few days ago, when the forecasts for Jan. 15 were still at or near freezing, I started feeling like we’ve seen this movie before: warnings of a weakening polar vortex, steadily worsening forecasts each day … This is what happened in February 2021 and December 2022.

The ability and beneficience of free minds and markets to handle the unknowns of future weather and ‘climate change’ has a strong intellectual case. Such is more true today than when the global warming debate began in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Four decades on, the case of classical liberalism against climate alarmism and forced energy transformation remains intact and strong–probably stronger than ever given the “saturation effect” of greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. [1] In fact, the debate should be not about the weather or climate but about Statism, that gargoyle of government intervention that makes rich people poorer and keeps poor people poor. Regarding climate, statism is what sets up the problems that are too often simplistically and erroneously blamed on ‘weather’ or ‘climate’.

I bring this up in relation to a new book that ignores and dumbs down the free-market, classical-liberal viewpoint on energy/climate in the name of … “classical liberalism.”…

“It’s a very regulated market, so I wouldn’t call the current state a ‘free market’ in any pure sense.” ( – Michael Giberson, R Street, October 27, 2023)

The understatement of the year, political economy-wise? I’ll take it, just as I did with Lynne Kiesling’s belated acknowledgement that the “knowledge problem” applied to ISOs/RTOs (yesterday’s post).

Is the Kiesling/Giberson obfuscation of today’s centrally planned wholesale market (and a government monopoly to boot) coming to an end? For more than a year, I have begged both Lynne and Michael on social media to simply define what is a free market in electricity–and compare that to the present governmental system.

“I will not dance to your tune,” Lynne answered once in the heat of battle, reversing her no-response, disengagement strategy. And now Giberson, almost as an aside, has put a trump card on the table.…