“By facilitating decentralized coordination instead of imposing specific outcomes, the institutions designed in Texas became the most market-oriented in the country, and the most likely to be resilient and adaptive in the face of unknown and charging economic, technological, and environmental conditions.”

– Lynne Kiesling and Andrew Kleit, eds. Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story (AEI: 2009), p. 3.

The Texas electricity debacle of February 2021 stands as the greatest failure in the history of the power industry–if not any other industry in America. Hundreds dead and many tens of billions of dollars in unnecessary expense led one system architect, Robert Borlick, to lament:

I have to admit, the ERCOT blackouts have shaken me. The amount of physical damage and human suffering they caused is astounding. Obviously, the ‘market’ failed to provide the service reliability that customers expected and deserved.

“Today, the libertarian Cato Institute releases its “Policy Handbook for the 104^th Congress,” a 39-essay proposal to dismantle the federal government…. The essay on energy was written by Cato camp follower Robert L. Bradley Jr. of Houston … president of his own energy think tank – well, OK, it’s small, more like a think bucket – called the Institute for Energy Research.”

How the energy debate has shifted in the last quarter-century–with the middle moving Left and the free market, classical liberal Right falling off the table. Today, the Green Party has been neutered by the Progressive (or Regressive, as Alex Epstein puts it) Left dictating the debate.

I was reminded of this upon encountering an old ‘Perspectives’ column from John H. Jennrich, the founder and editor of Natural Gas Week.…

Ed Note: A 65-mile, 400 MMCf/d pipeline approved by FERC and in service since late 2019 has been challenged in court by environmental groups that want to wean St. Louis residents off natural gas to force electrification. With successful court decisions, FERC has issued an emergency order for Spire STL to continue operation rather than shut down.

“The moral of this story? In an increasingly politicized economy, it is easier to get the business through government largess than to earn the business through healthy competition.”

Media bias…. “‘The $287 Million Pipeline No One Needed'” is the title of an article published on April 27, 2022, by Mario Ariza in The Intercept; “an award-winning news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism.”

Behind the article was Floodlight News, “a nonprofit climate newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action,” syndicated and picked up by similar “news” web sites.…

“Maybe instead of investigating the relatively high price [in early 2002] of gasoline, the government should check into its own regulatory and tax policies that artificially reduce supply and raise prices.”

This piece was written in first-quarter 2002 when environmental requirements were pushing reformulated gasoline prices higher, and the wellhead oil boom associated with hydraulic fractionation and horizontal drilling was a decade away.

Today, the war against oil from the Net Zero movement–now joined by the Russia/Ukraine conflict–has sent prices to historically high levels. Still, a mostly free market has wondrously overcome impediments to make a “depletable” mineral plentiful and affordable for hundreds of millions of Americans each day.

Let’s go back to the debate 20 years ago, when gasoline was sold for $1.50 per gallon (about $2.50 today)….

Crude oil prices are at a 6-month high. …