This post reproduces a short q&a with The Atlas Society on how the worldview of Ayn Rand and Objectivism influenced me personally and as a scholar interested in energy, history, political economy, and public policy. [For more information, see “The Fall of Ken Lay: An Interview with Former Enron Insider Robert Bradley Jr.” (April 1, 2006) and “Political Capitalism: Warnings and Reality” (February 4, 2013)

Tell us who you are? What’s the couple of sentence summary of what you do and what you’ve done?

I am a classical-liberal intellectual, or at least a student of classical liberalism.

I specialize in energy history and public policy. That has led me to business/government cronyism. And that had led to trying to understand contra-capitalism as it applies to organizational failure.…

“Renewables will never catch up to modern, efficient sources of energy. But this hasn’t stopped federal, state and local governments from continuing to force consumers and taxpayers to subsidize renewable energy companies, making energy in America less affordable and reliable in the process.” (- Bill Peacock, below)

Four years ago, after the election of Donald Trump, I contacted the head of the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle requesting a visit with the editorial board to introduce myself, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), and the classical-liberal worldview applied to energy. I got no response.

I then resent the request and got a curt no caps rely from the gentleman as in don’t-have-time-for you. I then responded with the fact that IER was a go-to Trump think tank, and my being the founder and from/in Houston would add interest.…

“Climate change, for many conservatives, is associated with fringe environmentalism and a political nemesis, [Al] Gore.”

“Climategate showed us what was behind the curtain,” said Robert Bradley…. There’s a whole lot of alarmism and a whole lot of scientific intolerance toward other views.”

– Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle, January 24, 2010.

Think back ten years ago, when a federal cap-and-trade bill passed the House and was before the Senate. And Climategate was just a few months old.

Today? Cap-and-trade remains dead as federal policy, and proposals for a carbon tax are not being pushed by Biden/Harris (Harris/Biden?) in the current debate. Climagate? Its ten-year anniversary last year brought forth numerous retrospectives, apologetic, critical, and harshly critical.

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All this brings me to a January 2010 piece by Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle, Climate Change Activists Work to Regain Momentum.…

Ed. Note: Back in May 2012, David Boaz of the Cato Institute reminisced about Robert Bradley’s 1996 treatise on oil and gas. His post follows:

At MasterResource, a free-market energy blog, Alex Epstein posts a glowing tribute to the 1996 Cato book Oil, Gas, and Government by Robert L. Bradley, Jr. (who happens to be a co-blogger at MasterResource). Oil, Gas, and Government is surely the longest book Cato ever published, and nobody knows better than I do—well, Rob Bradley does—how much work went into researching, writing, editing, and publishing it.

In these days of blogs and tweets, we’re used to consuming information in very small bites. But one of the fundamental roles of think tanks is to produce long-form research, not just talking points and congressional briefings. And Oil, Gas, and Government is very long form—1,997 pages in two volumes.…