“’I’m a businessman. I’ll take the [government green] money, that’s all I care about… I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here’.” – James Quigley, quoted in Politico ‘s “Power Switch” (below)

In the mid-19th century, Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, a political economist, wrote:

Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Every one is, more or less, for profiting by the labors of others. No one would dare to express such a sentiment; he even hides it from himself.

The Frenchman added:

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

“Alaska’s ‘capitalism in transition’ requires one final piece of legislation before reaching, arguably, the point of no return: a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS).”

Alaska has no shortage of recommendations from local environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) whose purpose is to implement global Malthusian degrowth.  These plans come at great cost to our future and way of life as free Alaskans.  

In March of 2022, “Alaska’s Renewable Energy Future – New Jobs, Affordable Energy” was released, a report on behalf of the Regenerative Economies Working Group – Alaska Climate Alliance / Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition. Imagining themselves as Alaska’s overlords, the study examined

the potential for 100% clean renewable energy to replace fossil fuels energy in Alaska by 2050 and its attendant benefits including more jobs, lower energy prices, higher energy security and the potential for renewable resources to support the equitable transition to hydrogen-based fuels for the aviation and maritime industry.

“To tackle the climate crisis, lower energy costs, and secure energy independence….” (General Preamble)

Kamala “climate light” Harris, as a campaigner, will not say that climate change is an “existential crisis” (much less yell it as the alarmists want). Harris rebuffs the notion that she would ban hydraulic fractionation with natural gas, reversing her previous pronouncements. She also states that electric cars (EVs) will not be mandated for drivers, backing away from a Biden Administration goal. Finally, Harris speaks little about the Green New Deal in general.

She is trying to get elected in the face of energy exceptionalism, which is the opposite of the Green New Deal. But her vagueness allows the major themes of ’24 Democratic Party Platform to be controlling.

The energy/climate narrative in the 91-page document does not include energy in Chapter Three: Lowering Costs.…

“A free market in electricity would terminate the current provisions of landmark federal statutes, such as the Power Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, Energy Policy Act of 1992, Energy Policy Act of 1995, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

My new AIER primer defines and applies the free-market classical liberal worldview to electricity. This is particularly important because this sound perspective has been both forgotten and misapplied.

Forgotten regarding the criticisms of traditional public utility regulation that emerged in the 1960s; misapplied regarding the current mandatory open access era involving central planning at the wholesale level with ISOs/RTOs.

My major points with quotations follow:

1. Electricity is a free-market product with a clear free market, classical liberal meaning: the separation of government and electricity in all phases and in the whole.…