“Onshore development on federal lands – which is roughly estimated at 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate – is extremely limited and is increasingly so. In 2009, for example, the current administration leased fewer onshore acres for energy development than in any preceding year on record.”

“Offshore development on 1.76 billion acres of mineral lands has suffered from a de-facto administration embargo, with lease plans cancelled, moratoria imposed, and cumbersome regulatory activity that serve to discourage exploration.”

“Today, permitting delays by federal regulators have driven the wait to more than 300 days before drilling can begin on federal lands, about twice as long as it took in 2005. By contrast, states like North Dakota are now turning permits in 10 days; Ohio, 14 days; Colorado, 27 days.”

The United States is an energy-rich country with large quantities of U.S.…

Ed. note: This three-part post series (Part II: Coal Issues tomorrow; Part III: Federal Lands Potention on Friday) is taken from testimony presented by Mary J. Hutzler on February 5, 2013, before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Committee on Energy and Commerce. The hearing was titled: American Energy Security and Innovation: An Assessment of North America’s Energy Resources. A summary of her remarks is here.

The United States has vast resources of oil, natural gas, and coal. In just a few short years, a forty-year paradigm that the U.S.  was energy poor has been reversed. The world’s mineral-energy resource base is enlarging, not depleting–and leading the way is the U.S. with private firms exploring and producing from private lands.

In December 2011, IER published a report entitled North American Energy Inventory that provides the magnitude of these resources for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.…

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions … adaptation to the unknown can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions…. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”

– F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76.

Stephen Chu, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), announced last week his intention to step down once a replacement is found. His 3,800-word resignation letter should be critically studied by students of energy policy and, indeed, public policy more generally.

I offer ten critical points to bear in mind as Chu’s letter is read (other points can be added in the comments section).…

Mayors and governors cannot say they weren’t adequately warned, not just once, but time and time again – in news stories, reports, photographs and graphic personal recollections. New York City was told in 1968 that it needed to protect its infrastructure from a potential 20-foot rise in water above sea level. Sandy was 14 feet.

Still more official reports by various agencies repeated these warnings over the next four decades – but with little or no action being taken by the city, even though the latest projection warned of water levels rising nearly 30 feet in the vicinity of John F. Kennedy Airport. The December 1992 nor’easter also foreshadowed Sandy flooding major sections of the PATH and subway systems.

Those reports and the accompanying photos provide merely the tips of the proverbial icebergs that these captains of titanic states and urban areas ignore at their citizens’ peril.…