“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.…

“So will Michael Giberson and Lynne Kiesling ever consider the opportunity cost of their politicized electricity ‘market’? Will they consider a real free market that was at the center of the classical liberal debate before mandatory open access (etc.) came along? How much failure–and how far on the ‘road to serfdom’ does U.S. energy policy have to go before mid-course corrections?”

Lynne Kiesling and her close associate Michael Giberson have done great damage to the simple conception of a free-market electricity market and related public policy. By the use of hidden assumptions, cloudy definitions, and disengagement (all to “raise rival’s cost”), they have misled many free-market scholars in regard to a fundamental industry.

I am documenting this as much as I can for the historical record. Kiesling counters that I am ignorant of the technical subject matter and exhibit “aggressiveness” in my quest for clarification and openness.…