A Free-Market Energy Blog

U.S. EPA: Playing Fast and Loose with Health and Welfare

By -- May 27, 2012

An eye-opening case can be made that Obama Administration’s EPA is threatening our energy, economy, health, welfare, justice, and civil rights. A stiff charge, indeed, but one that needs to be examined in due depth this Memorial Day and throughout the year.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says we face grave threats to human health, welfare and justice. She’s absolutely right. However, the dangers are not due to factory or power plant emissions, or supposed effects of “dangerous manmade global warming.”

They are the result of policies and regulations that her EPA is imposing in the name of preventing climate change and other hypothetical and exaggerated environmental problems. It is those government actions that are the gravest threat to Americans’ health, welfare, and pursuit of happiness and justice.

Hyperregulation

By hyper-regulating carbon dioxide, soot, mercury, “cross-state air pollution” from sources hundreds of miles away, and other air and water emissions, EPA intends to force numerous coal-fired power plants to shut down years before their productive life is over; sharply reduce emissions from cars, factories, refineries and other facilities, regardless of the costs; and block the construction of new coal-fired power plants, because none will be able to slash their carbon dioxide emissions to half of what average coal-fired plants now emit, without employing expensive (and nonexistent) CO2 capture and storage technologies.…

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The Essential ‘Oil, Gas & Government’ (Kudos to a treatise in the age of the blog)

By -- May 25, 2012

While recently researching energy history for a writing project, I was reminded of how valuable–and underrated–Robert Bradley’s Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience is. While there are countless books covering the history of energy from one angle or another, very few, in my experience, can be counted on for precision and accuracy.

The majority of books I read that reference early petroleum history, for example, tell a radically oversimplified narrative of petroleum replacing whale oil. However, if one reads Harold Williamson and Arnold Daum’s definitive two-volume The American Petroleum Industry, [1] one learns about a far more intricate and interesting progress, including the one-time dominance of camphene, a turnpentine-based illuminant that preceded petroleum–or the story of “coal oil,” which was once believed to be the illuminant of the future. (I discuss this history in my essay Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market.)…

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Professor Hicks's Business Ethics Course (Loyola Chicago's MBA class in for a real treat)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 24, 2012

MasterResource is about energy (the master resource). But our ‘free market energy blog‘ is also about the economic system of market capitalism versus political capitalism. In fact, under the category Corporate Governance, entries can be found for

And so it was with great interest that I found out that Stephen Hicks, a Ph.D. philosopher in the Objectivist tradition, is teaching a course on business ethics to MBA students at Loyola University Chicago. Loyola’s business ethics program is considered one of the finest in the country, and, in fact, was ranked first in the country last year by BusinessWeek.

Professor Hicks is not your average philosophy professor.…

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Politics and the Nation's Next Nuclear Plant (Georgia Power's boondoggle under construction)

By Jim Clarkson -- May 23, 2012
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American Products. American Power. (new website on petroleum's consumer bounty)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 22, 2012
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'Offshore Oil Guide': Are You Ready for Some Real Free-market Jobs, Anyone Anywhere?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 21, 2012
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Real World Economics (key to understanding real-world energy)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 18, 2012
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Greens to Michelle Obama: Ignore Science, Please (anti-shale movement getting desperate)

By Steve Everley -- May 17, 2012
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James Hansen's War Against Canada

By Kenneth P. Green -- May 16, 2012
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Star States on the Road to U.S. Hydrocarbon Plenty

By Julia Bell -- May 15, 2012
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