Search Results for: "Enron, wind power"
Relevance | DateRemembering the Death of Federal Cap-and-Trade (2010 NYT analysis revisited)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 13, 2018 1 Comment“This is potentially a $3 trillion tax,” [C. Boyden] Gray said, “which is pretty steep in the best of times, and poison in the worst of times.”
“… in trying to assemble a majority to pass it, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey dished out a cornucopia of concessions and exemptions to coal companies, utilities, refiners, heavy industry and agribusinesses. The original simplicity was lost, replaced by a bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.”
– John Broder, ‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice, New York Times, March 25, 2010.
The carbon tax is less a cat with nine lives than a dead cat with nine causes. Higher immediate energy prices for one. Border tariffs, equity adjustments, federal control, global government makes five.…
Continue ReadingAttack on Tom Stacy: “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” (anti-wind effort smeared by crony environmentalist)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 11, 2018 4 Comments“Mr. Anderson and the Energy and Policy Institute marginalize themselves by assuming what must be debated. Thinking persons want to know about tradeoffs: economic and environmental. And what about the fact that Tom Stacy has been and mostly is a volunteer for his cause, unlike Anderson who gets a nice full-time, six-figure salary for his?”
It is strange to read a perfectly normal, accurate biography of someone only to realize that the other side is using facts to try to smear someone for doing a sensible thing.
And for Tom Stacy, that “thing” is pushing back at the grassroots level against monstrous industrial wind turbines that are environmentally invasive, anti-consumer, and anti-taxpayer.
Yet mainstream environmentalists, favoring high prices and less reliability for the master resource of energy, not to mention environmental energy sprawl, pretend that there is an inherent social good in renewable energies that are inferior in every which way.…
Continue ReadingContra-Capitalism as a Business Syndrome
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 27, 2018 5 Comments“Beyond rent-seeking, a corporation can engage in other behaviors long decried by classical liberals, behaviors that might be characterized as contra-capitalism.”
Cronyism … Rent-seeking … Regulatory capture … Special-interest politics … Strategic uses of government intervention … Many terms have described business lobbying within the up-for-grabs socioeconomic system of political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means. [1] It results in what classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch calls bad profit. [2]
But beyond rent-seeking, a corporation can engage in other behaviors long decried by classical liberals, behaviors that might be characterized as contra-capitalism. Importantly, the corporation might not recognize these behaviors as an explicit strategy (Enron did not; Tesla does not). These separable behaviors are complementary. And now, with a term, what was implicit can become explicit for the public policy and corporate-governance debate.…
Continue ReadingEnergy Statism: R Street Hits New Low (carbon tax dead, so wind & solar lovefest today)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- March 8, 2018 4 Comments“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”
It had to happen.
With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.
Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.…
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