[Editors note: This four-part post examines the innovation and creative destruction of the early oil market. It was originally published by The Objective Standard.]
The most important and most overlooked energy issue today is the growing statist threat to global energy supply.
There is no substitute for available, affordable, and reliable supply. Cheap, industrial-scale energy is essential to building, transporting, and operating everything we use, from refrigerators to Internet server farms to hospitals. It is desperately needed in the undeveloped world, where 1.6 billion people lack electricity, which contributes to untold suffering and death. And it is needed in ever-greater, more-affordable quantities in the industrialized world: Energy usage and standard of living are directly correlated.1
Every dollar added to the cost of energy is a dollar added to the cost of life.…
Continue Reading[Editor note: This post was prepared by Mary Hutzler, Dan Simmons, et al. for the Town Hall blog at the Institute for Energy Research, a free-market ‘all-energy-all-the-time’ think tank.]
“The federal government is ultimately responsible for the long-term … consistent [energy] policy…. A clean energy portfolio standard is one example of a potential policy that the administration and Congress should discuss.… In this time of fiscal austerity I propose such a standard.”
–Secretary Steven Chu
With each passing day, the odds of Congress passing a Renewable Electricity Standard grow more and more dim. But Energy Secretary Chu, Senator Graham, and others are now promoting a similar mandate under a new name. Their old vinegar/new bottle effort should be exposed and rejected as the wrong path for energy policy.
Instead of a renewable electricity mandate, Chu, Graham, et al.…
Continue ReadingI am considered a leading critic of peak oil, the belief that oil production has peaked, is peaking, or will peak soon. I am a resource optimist in the Julian Simon tradition and believe that resourceship allows so-called depletable resources to expand, refuting the fixity/depletion mindset.
This said, I am empirically oriented. So let’s study and debate the facts, while remembering the record of peak-oil forecasts from the beginning to the present.
For my optimist/resourceship/expansionist position, I get slammed a good bit, such as by Joe Romm and by Gabriel Rotello at the Huffington Post (but also supported there by Raymond Learsay). I mostly take the fuss, which is two parts emotionalism to one part intellectual argument.
But when David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute published a piece calling a New York Times story “inaccurate, misleading and unhelpful ‘journalism’” I thought to add a comment.…
Continue Reading