[Editor note: This interview with Rob Bradley from the April 2006 issue of The New Individualist, published by The Atlas Society, is reproduced for two reasons: 1) the role of Lay and Enron in launching the global warming debate within the energy industry in the late 1980s and 1990s; 2) the role of Bradley during his 16 years at the company brought up by critics of the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance.]
TNI: Why should Objectivists, libertarians, and individualists take an interest in the collapse of Enron and particularly in the fall of Ken Lay?
Bradley: Enron will prove to be one of the most important episodes in the history of American business, and its story, from beginning to end, is inseparable from Ken Lay, its founder and long-time chairman.…
Continue Reading[This piece, which originally appeared in the (Canadian) National Post, can be read in conjunction with MasterResource posts on “peak oil” here and here. A brief bio of Mr. Foster appears at the end of this post.]
The great petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt famously said that “Oil is found in the minds of men.” Discoveries depend on visionary theory, technical innovation and commitment to risky drilling. Plus luck. Peak Oil theory, by contrast -which asserts that global oil production has, or soon will, peak, and that this has powerful policy implications — is found in the limitations of the minds of men. It is less geological theory than unevolved intellectual shortcoming, although it certainly has its political uses.
The fruits of the “greatest resource,” as economist Julian Simon dubbed the human mind, appeared yet again this week with the announcement by BP that it had found a “giant” field at unprecedented depth in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that twenty years ago was regarded as played out.…
Continue Reading“Waxman-Markey is largely top-down regulation dressed in cap-and-trade clothing.”
David Schoenbrod and Richard Stewart, “The Cap-and-Trade Bait and Switch“, Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2009.
The Environmental Left is pushing hard to provoke a civil war between natural gas industry (its “friend”) against the coal (and oil) industry. John Podesta (Center for American Progress) and Tim Wirth (UN Foundation) have cooked up a menu of bribes (taxes, a.k.a. “incentives,” “credits,” “allowances,” and “expand”) as follows:
… Continue ReadingElectricity
• Establish incentives to retire aging, inefficient, dirty coal-fired power plants, and replace them with renewable and low-carbon electricity.
• Create a renewables integration credit to offset specific costs associated with producing high levels of renewable energy and to reward those who go beyond the renewable electricity standard.
• Establish a dedicated incentive for development and deployment of “dispatchable” renewable energy to build markets for electricity storage technology.