“In 2009, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote in the Financial Times that increased natural gas use was the ‘first step towards saving our planet and jump-starting our economy.’ Last year, he changed course and called natural gas a ‘catastrophe‘.”

An environmental group that opposes fracking has deleted from its website a page that touted the land use benefits of horizontal drilling, a move that comes as activist groups increasingly focus on surface issues related to development, and as some cities debate whether to ban drilling based on those claims. The attempt to conceal prior support for drilling also reflects a trend among several activist organizations that used to promote natural gas.

The Washington, DC-based Earthworks – an aggressive anti-fracking group that has published or promoted several dubious reports suggesting harm from shale development – used to house a page entitled “Directional Drilling” on its website, which described how directional and horizontal drilling can actually reduce overall surface impacts from oil and gas development.…

“Each year, the Progressive Policy Institute publishes its list of ‘investment heroes’ – non-financial companies that are investing the most in the U.S. economy. Of the 25 companies that make up the Institute’s ‘investment heroes’ list this year, 10 are involved to some degree in the exploration and production of oil and natural gas or involved in energy distribution and power.”

“For decades now, the United States has pursued energy policies based on the fear of scarcity. The thinking in Washington, D.C. – and even at some energy companies – was that reviving domestic energy production was a dream…. Now, we need energy policies that are designed for this new era of abundance.”

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson recently addressed the Greater Houston Partnership on the State of Energy. He paid homage to Houston, where ExxonMobil’s far flung operations are about to be brought together at one campus.…

Two weeks ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a state-of-the-art climate and energy conference in the nation’s energy capital of Houston. The global warming establishment may have stayed away, but a large crowd was treated to a sound, multi-disciplinary review of the physical science, political economy, and resource economics.

The evening keynote for At The Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit was an address by Texas Governor Rick Perry. While Perry’s general public policy positions are free-market–and thus pro-consumer and pro-taxpayer–his energy security, don’t-import-but-export argument smacks of Mercantilism and U.S.-side protectionism. Furthermore, Perry pulled his punches regarding the conference’s major themes on climate and energy policy. It was a timid, uninspired keynote just when the momentum dictated going the other way.

Soft on Climate Propoganda

Perry could have, should have, reiterated the conference’s major themes: the 15–20 year ‘pause’ in global warming; lowered climate sensitivity estimates (and explanation for the same in the peer-reviewed literature); the desperate, speculative tie-in’s between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events (if there has been no warming, how can ‘climate change’ be involved?);…

“But while the IPCC chooses to look the other way, the scientific evidence supporting low equilibrium climate sensitivity continues to pile up…. This is all around good news, for it means that we can focus more on expanding energy access (via fossil fuels) around the world rather than curtail our energy growth.”

There are basically three key parameters that determine the pace and magnitude of future climate change: 1) how much carbon are we going to emit, 2) what percentage of those emissions will remain in the atmosphere (as opposed to being taken up by the biosphere), and 3) how much will the climate warm as a result of what remains in the atmosphere. We understand these things a lot better than we often let on.

The first parameter seems difficult to assess on timescales that exceed a couple of decades.…