The following questions and answers were posted by The Atlas Society in conjunction with their upcoming Atlas Summit next week. Other posts at MasterResource on the philosophy of Objectivism and its application to energy can be found here.

Elsewhere, Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress is fully engaged in the climate and energy debates, employing the philosophy of Ayn Rand and her belief that truth is objective, discernible, and applicable to matters of everyday life. Through the work of Bradley and Epstein, Rand’s voice from decades ago resounds in today’s discussions of man’s need for plentiful energy.

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Five Ayn Rand Questions for Robert Bradley

1) Tell us who you are? What’s the couple of sentence summary of what you do and what you’ve done?

I am a classical-liberal intellectual, or at least a student of classical liberalism.…

“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”

“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”

– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.

It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…

“Robert Bradley, of the petro-funded and misleadingly named Institute for Energy Research (Ministry for Fossil Fuel Propaganda, perhaps, would be more precise), continues his lengthy crusade against clean energy with a tirade against subsidies in yesterday’s Washington Times.

Given that Mr. Bradley was director of public policy analysis for seven years at Enron, the natural gas giant that collapsed some years ago in a cloud of falsehoods and lawsuits, one might reasonably question whether his energy policy wisdom should guide the nation.”

– Tom Gray, American Wind Energy Association, “Bradley, IER Continue Long Crusade Against Clean Energy,’ Into the Wind: AWEA Blog, July 29, 2011.

How does one respond to such a statement as this? Mr. Gray may think he is an environmentalist and that windpower is an environmental blessing, but that does not make it so.…

“Forced use of higher-cost U.S.-flag vessels has benefitted domestic water carrier firms, shipbuilding companies, and associated labor. This advantage, however, has been diluted because inflated shipping costs has reduced the attractiveness of barge and tanker transport compared to other alternatives.”

The current debate over legalization of oil exports is intertwined with cabotage (water vessel) protectionism. The previous two posts (Part I; Part II) examined the history of oil-export regulation by the federal government; this post surveys water-vessel restrictions from Washington, D.C., that directly or indirectly impact the oil trade.

In 1808 and 1817, the United States passed legislation reserving coastwise and intercoastal trade to U.S.-built and registered vessels. [1] Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act, reaffirmed this policy and extended it to the noncontiguous U.S.…