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May 16, 2022
Canceling Federal Oil and Gas Leases Isn’t About Climate Change
The Biden administration last week canceled a large oil and gas lease sale — over 1 million acres — in the Alaska Cook Inlet as well as two sales in the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department argued that the Alaska cancellation was “due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area,” but that is obvious…
May 3, 2022
Offshore Fossil Leasing and the Biden Flouting of the Law
Let us review the plain language of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (§1344(a)): “The Secretary [of the Interior] shall prepare and periodically revise, and maintain an oil and gas leasing program,” defined by the Congressional Research Service as a requirement that the Interior Department “prepare and maintain forward-looking five-year plans… to schedule proposed oil and gas lease sales on the U.S. outer continental shelf…
April 25, 2022
Some Fallacies Attendant Upon the Biden Resumption of Fossil Leasing
The Biden administration announced late last week that it would resume leasing of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration and production, but at a scale (144,000 acres) about 80 percent smaller than the 733,000 acres that had been nominated by energy companies for evaluation by the Department of the Interior. (Over 90 percent of the acreage to…
April 22, 2022
Earth Day 2022: Investing in Poverty, Suffering, and Human Degradation
It is Earth Day 2022 — always falling on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough — the official theme of which this year is Invest In Our Planet™. As with every previous Earth Day, we will be bombarded with innumerable web sites both infantile and mendacious, crude propaganda exercises, myriad pleas for networking, virtue signaling as a central dynamic, mindless…
April 14, 2022
More Gasoline Gimmickry From the Biden Administration
Oh what a tangled web it weaves when first the Biden administration practices to deceive. That is a slight paraphrase of Sir Walter Scott’s famous observation, but it is wholly appropriate as a general description of the Biden administration’s desperate efforts to avoid political responsibility for the sharp increases in fuel costs for which its fossil-fuel…
March 28, 2022
Illiberalism’s True Colors
Nineteen-fifty-six—when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary—was, according to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the year “British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.” If 2016 did not constitute such a year for conservatives in the West, then perhaps 2022—when Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine—will, at least for those…
March 28, 2022
The Ukraine Tragedy as Political Opportunism
Never let a crisis go to waste, as the age-old Beltway wisdom goes, but one might think that the Ukraine crisis, in which thousands of innocents are dying and losing their homes, millions have been driven into refugee camps, and in which Russian military savagery is the order of the day, might give the usual…
March 17, 2022
Does the Biden Administration Deserve Blame for High Gasoline Prices?
Gasoline prices are nothing if not visible, and that such prices are high and rising is unlikely to help the party holding the White House. Average U.S. gasoline prices have risen from about $2.87 per gallon a year ago to $4.31 (as of March 16), an increase of 50 percent. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the administration now…
March 8, 2022
Observations on Banning Vs. Sanctioning Russian Crude Oil
Amid the ongoing debate in the U.S. about the wisdom of banning the importation of Russian petroleum, roughly 5-10 percent of total U.S. petroleum imports (crude oil and refined products), it is perhaps unsurprising that some basic principles are being forgotten, unfortunately a ubiquitous characteristic of Beltway analyses. In particular: A U.S. ban on the importation of…
February 17, 2022
Some of the Public Policies That Factor in Rising Energy Costs
Rising energy costs are highly visible and therefore not politically advantageous for politicians with constituencies comprising large numbers of energy consumers. And in politics, as the old saying goes, when you’re explaining you’re losing, a reality that drives most such public officials away from analytics — even if we assume that they understand them —…