The wonderful “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” statement attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen  may be apocryphal, but it remains a prescient warning to our nation’s leaders. At a time when Congress is throwing billions of dollars around like pocket change based on claims of scientists and engineers, a real quote of Dirksen may be equally important (Congressional Record: June 16, 1965, p. 13884):

One time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat fell in a well 100 feet deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the well?

In the wake of the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the attempted terrorist bombing of New York’s Times Square, the broadcast media have been full of the sackcloth and ashes crowd pronouncing once more the end of the hydrocarbon era and the vital need for the U.S. to “break our oil addiction” ASAP.

Their soundbites start with a half-truth and end with a fallacy.  We are told that “60 percent of U.S. energy supplies still come from oil and gas,” with the implication that (i) all of that is imported; and (ii) the pittance that we produce domestically all comes from offshore facilities.

 It is true that 60 percent (actually 62.5%) of our energy comes from oil and gas.  But the portion that comes from natural gas, about 24% of total U.S.…

Editor’s note: Notwithstanding some recent gains, e.g. Cape Wind’s Interior Department permit, the projected U.K. Thames Array, and the politically motivated Danish pronouncement of renewed offshore installations, global offshore wind has progressed very slowly, especially in Germany. This article by Ms. Linowes, founder of the Industrial Wind Action Group, provides some of the reasons why offshore wind is such an environmental and economic troublemaker.

After nine years of debate and millions of public and private dollars, the decision to permit America’s first offshore wind project fell on the shoulders of one man, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar. Hindsight notwithstanding, there was no chance Salazar could disapprove the Cape Wind application. Does anyone doubt the Obama administration would dare to ignore the tsunami of political favoritism already bestowed on the project, no matter how unjustified?…

[Editor note: A profile of Guillermo “Billy” Yeatts, an Argentinean and energy expert, author, and free-market philanthropist, is at the end of this post.]

The history of oil and gas production in Latin America has been characterized by a continuing tug of war between the state as owner of the subsurface (Spanish colonial tradition) and private producers in pursuit of profits. Private participation in the industry has been limited to brief periods and restricted to specific phases of oil and gas production.

The typical pattern is that foreign oil and gas companies are allowed into a country to locate and initiate production. Once oil is flowing, governments nationalize the companies’ facilities – with or without compensation – and hand them over to government-owned and operated monopolies.

Whether the oil or gas is produced by private corporations or by a government monopoly, it is almost always the government that receives most of the profits.…