The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has been a consistent voice for classical liberalism in energy and climate for several decades. CEI stays scholarly on the intellectual front (thank Marlo Lewis et al.) and activist on the policy front. The latest from the lean, pound-for-pound, heavy hitting think tank (letter of August 16, 2023) follows:

Dear Members of Congress:

On the first anniversary of enactment of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the undersigned organizations strongly urge you to ensure that the IRA’s Green New Deal-type policies quickly come to an end.

We recognize that in the next year complete repeal of the IRA’s harmful energy and environmental provisions is unlikely. However, clear and tangible legislative changes that make genuine progress towards that goal are realistic and expected.

IRA proponents will today be celebrating the bill’s passage.…

“Now, climate warriors have arrayed their forces against manmade ‘chemical’ nitrogen fertilizers. The convenient collateral damage in this campaign is the natural gas required to produce this essential plant nutrient.”

Throughout modern history science-based increases in food production and the wealth it generates have brought astonishing reductions in population growth rates. Then came climate alarmism and forced energy transformation.

The farmers toil as many Americans relax and take summer vacations. The agricultural sector today represents only 1.3 percent of our population compared to 30 percent a century ago, producing record harvests through brains, sweat, and science (and CO2 enrichment and longer growing seasons). Yet many of them feel uneasy about the climate-change exaggerators who have them in the government’s crosshairs.

A New Front

It is not only beef from cattle, a methane issue.…

“A 10% reduction off the retail rate for wholesale power would net Summit Ridge Energy a price of $0.1181 per kWh, which is 244% higher than the average wholesale rate in 2021 that all other power producers received. And that boost will be absorbed and passed on to all retail ratepayers.”

“The $2.5 billion investment in production plants that Q-Cells promises isn’t really coming from the company, but from the U.S. Treasury courtesy of federal taxpayers’ largesse and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.”

Last month, Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Korean-owned solar photovoltaic module plant in Dalton, Georgia. Long known as the carpet capital of America (and perhaps less illustriously as the Home of the Blonde Bombshell), Dalton will now host a vastly-expanded Korean-owned solar panel production facility operated by a company called Q-Cells.…

“The supply-side reliability fix offered by the Texas Senate is a direct response to the February 2021 carnage created by, yes, wind and solar taking over a once reliable grid. It is a hard-wired governmental solution to a soft-wired governmental problem. But there is an alternative. Free markets, anyone?”

The big guns of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation are out to prevent Texas from shoring up its grid from the cancer of wind and solar. Out of the blue, the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter (Substack) appears, with the message that renewables are not the problem but the solution, complemented by, in Doug Lewin’s words, “Fast-acting reciprocating engines, batteries, geothermal power, and demand response [to] help with both resource adequacy and operational flexibility.”

In denial about the wounded supply side–where the obvious solution is to demote (government-enabled) intermittent resources–the answer is “smart meters” in the home so Big Brother can oversee demand.…