Back in December 2015, I submitted an editorial to the Houston Chronicle that they published in their edition to the suburbs–but not Houston proper. The fix was in; this would be one of the last editrials I would have published at a major suburban newspaper that went Left, far Left.

In the buildup to the Nov. 30-Dec. 11 United Nations climate summit in Paris, climate alarmists tried to end intellectual debate over the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is the 28th year of the climate crusade to globally cap industrial life.

The secular religion of climate “stabilization” did not arise from nowhere. It emerged in the same period as the discrediting of the Malthusian mainstays of depletion and pollution, as well as the discrediting of socialism/central planning. As such, it has been a savior for government control of economic life, or statism.…

“Although intended to counteract the problems caused by an earlier violation of property rights—the legalized monopoly status that utilities gained under ratebase regulation—the forced opening of the grid was itself a violation of property rights.”

“In the wake of a liberated electric grid based on property rights and private ownership of the rights-of-way, the imaginations, ingenuities, and profit motives of scientists, engineers, and financiers would produce all manner of possibilities.” (Raymond Niles, below)

Raymond C. Niles is one of those people who has “forgotten more than I know.” His insights from 13 years ago in electricity history and policy (one of his many interests in political economy) ring loud in the wake of the Great Texas Electricity Blackout of February 2021.

I recently came across Niles’s May 2008 essay, “Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid,” published in The Objective Standard.…

“There are far too few heroes and far too many failures in the history of presidential energy politics.”

Who can claim to be a true energy President from a pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, pro-free-market perspective?

Which U.S. heads qualify for an anti-energy label for violating economics 101–and endangering the health and welfare of all of us who rely on the MasterResource?

Of the 30 or so candidates in the Lincoln-to-Biden era (the first commercial oil well dates from 1859), just a few names compete for the best, while many more vie for the worst.

Two Best: Trump and Reagan

The best two from a classical liberal perspective are Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. A third candidate just does not come to mind, certainly in the modern energy era.…

“Bad economics required the DOE furnace mandate in the first place: replacing gas furnaces are much cheaper than a new electric heating refit even with a longer-term, back-end savings. Why? Because consumers, given the choice, chose gas.”

The mandatory energy efficiency movement (conservationism vs. market conservation) arose alongside oil and natural gas shortages in the 1970s. It began prior to the Arab Embargo as President Nixon’s price control order of August 1971 was having its predictable, undesirable effect.

In March 1973, wholesale oil shortages and dire resource predictions led Congress to hold a full-fledged energy conservation hearing. The first fuel conservation hearing in decades, a new movement was begun not seen since World War II’s fuel rationing program.

What began with the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973 continued apace in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 and with the creation of the U.S.…