“The key to sustainable resource development is private property rights to the subsoil, not monopoly government deciding what public projects to undertake. The history of government and petroleum is clear on this.”

In a Council on Foreign Relations study, “Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate” (2024), authors Diana Roy and Amelia Cheatham wrote:

Venezuela’s ongoing descent into economic and political chaos is a cautionary tale of the dangerous influence that resource wealth can have on developing countries.

Calling Guillermo Yeatts and his case for privatizing the subsoil for mass wealth creation and democratization! But the authors work within the socialist, nationalist paradigm. Their Summary follows (verbatim):

• Venezuela is an example of a petrostate, where the government is highly dependent on fossil fuel income, power is concentrated, and corruption is widespread. 

Editor: Reuters’ warning that ending wind and solar subsidies will raise electricity prices is the latest version of a familiar argument. Lisa Linowes (WindAction) challenged this argument when it was used to defend the Production Tax Credit in 2012 (Wind Energy Without the PTC) and in 2014 (AWEA Spins Price Distortions to Save PTC). More than a decade later, Reuters is again defending the undefendable. 

“Wind and solar developers naturally want the public to equate nameplate megawatts with reliable supply, subsidized bids with total costs, and rapid deployment with technical necessity. They are selling projects. Reuters should be doing something different. The press should test industry claims, not launder them into economic commonsense.”

Once again, a major media outlet is laundering the renewable-energy industry’s sales pitch through the authority of its news brand.…

“Is” certainly does not equal “ought.” The market has not spoken. The senators do not have an intellectual case for agricultural rent-seeking and crony capitalism. The way forward, as Travis Fisher of the Cato Institute explains, is to abolish the mandate and let a free market determine the right (lower) amount of ethanol needed as an oxygenate.

Apologists for uneconomical, government-dependent energies (a federally mandated ethanol mandate in this case) must use the best arguments they can conjure up, especially any that might appear plausible to the short-attention-span reader. The half-truth can do this, with the truth part setting up the deception. Another ploy is the “is” as if it is “ought.”

Consider the letter published in the Wall Street Journal last month by five farm state senators [1], “The Market Has Spoken: E15 Is a Net Positive” (June 4, 2026).…

“Democrats and environmentalists are shifting their approach to climate change…. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines.”

– Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, New York Times (below)

It was “all of the above” on the way up, and it is “all of the above” on the way down. Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer’s “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure” (New York Times, June 11, 2026) is worth revisiting to document the sea change that has occurred in the Democrat party away from climate alarmism and forced energy transformation.

“As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change,” the article begins.…