“Price controls cause shortages, and government allocation exacerbates it. This was learned the hard way during the 1970s, particularly with oil, thanks to Republican President Richard Nixon.”

George Melloan’s review of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2016) criticized her foray into energy and energy policy:

Ms. Mayer might herself benefit from an economics course. She writes that Richard Nixon imposed economic controls on oil and gas in 1971 to “address the energy crisis.” The Nixon price controls helped to cause the energy crisis.

Intrigued, I bought Dark Money to see exactly what she said.  Here is the passage from Mayer (p. 91) referenced by Melloan:

The fossil fuel industry’s fondest wishes were also fulfilled.

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more interesting articles in this issue are:

Five Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Subsidize Wind or Solar

Study: 3.8 Million US Jobs will be Lost in the Transition to Renewables

Turbine Noise Calculations for 1238 Homes

New Research on Turbines Killing Bats

Broken Wing: Birds, Blades and Broken Promises

Recycling: An Energy Loser

No Matter Where It’s Sited, Industrial Wind Energy is a NET loser

MIT PhD writes op-ed on some Wind Limitations

Community once in favor of wind energy, now overwhelmingly opposed

Climate Alarmists now Attacking Satellite Data

Climate Change Science & the Climate Change Scare

Paris Agreement: Recycled Socialism

Conservatives, Climate Change, and the Carbon Tax

1400 CEOs – Climate Change Not a Major Worry

1001 Reasons why Global Warming is so Over in 2016

New Scientific Study: “A New View on Climate Change”

The Corrosion of Conformity on Campus

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Greed Energy Economics:

Five Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Subsidize Wind or Solar

Study: 3.8 Million US Jobs will be Lost in the Transition to Renewables

Pope Francis and the Climate for Giving

60 Minutes: China is behind The Great Brain Robbery

Insurers: Global Warming Makes Natural Disasters Less Expensive

The Gov’t Has Spent a Lot on Electric Cars — Is it Worth it?…

“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”

“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”

– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.

It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…

“Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several.”

– Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.

“The accumulation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly raising the global temperature and disrupting climate patterns, with implications for economic stability worldwide. Research and analysis at RFF supports informed policy design and negotiations to address climate change on national and international levels.”

– Resources for the Future website (2016).

Oh how Resources for the Future (RFF) has bought entirely into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation for fun and profit. The two quotations above, a quarter century apart, say much.

I was reminded of old-versus-new RFF by its press release last week tied to President Obama’s final state of the union speech.…