“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”

– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (1979), p. 219.

Tomorrow (October 5, 2016), a book seminar will be held at Resources for the Future [register here] to revisit the lessons from the 1970s energy crisis. Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s by Meg Jacobs will receive comments from three RFF scholars.

The Princeton historian and author usefully provides a good deal of archival documentation surrounding the ill-fated attempt by federal authorities to regulate the price and allocation of crude oil and oil products in the 1971–1981 era. …

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.…

“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don’t postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

– Donald Trump, signatory letter/advertisement in the New York Times, December 6, 2009.

“A Trump Administration will focus on real environmental challenges, not phony ones …. We’ll solve real environmental problems in our communities like the need for clean and safe drinking water.”

– Donald Trump, “An America First Energy Plan.” May 26, 2016.

Consider it corrected.

It does not take a climate scientist to understand the intellectual weaknesses of climate alarm. And it does not take a political scientist or political economist to see the problems of any one-world solution, much less a domestic one, to this alleged international problem.…

“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.…