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October 12, 2019
The Trouble with ‘renewable’ Energy
“Renewable” electricity — predominantly wind and solar power — is all the rage, described by numerous commentators, politicians, pundits, journalists, and other such “experts” as cost-competitive, clean, and a major part of the solution to the “existential crisis” now purportedly looming large as an attendant effect of anthropogenic climate change. A massive expansion of wind…
October 10, 2019
Has Irwin Stelzer Asked the Right Question on Climate Change?
My friend and former colleague Irwin M. Stelzer has written a short but interesting essay on climate policy, arguing that by asking the right question we will be oriented toward a useful set of policy prescriptions given the substantial uncertainties about the underlying facts and projections of anthropogenic warming. His arguments, which reflect closely those he articulated…
July 18, 2019
Using the Money of Investors to Promote the Theory of Man-made Warming
The House Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Committee on Financial Services, held a hearing earlier this month on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure rules and possible legislation requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission to mandate ESG standards for all publicly-traded firms. This would include a requirement that companies disclose in their annual reports the financial and business…
July 8, 2019
The Confusions of the ‘conservative’ Carbon Tax
Various news reports and self-serving political pronouncements would have us believe that imposition of a tax on “carbon” — emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) — now enjoys growing support among Republican policymakers and conservative observers, a political premise advertised at a decibel level vastly higher than actual political reality would support. That reality is straightforward:…
May 6, 2019
Once the GOP Rolls out Climate Policies, It Endorses All the Assumptions of the Left
You can’t beat something with nothing, according to ancient Beltway wisdom, an outlook guaranteed to yield an inexorable increase in the size, cost, and destructiveness of government, even as it forces the opponents of “something” gradually to adopt the assumptions of the proponents, and to descend into a process of negotiating with themselves. The latest…
April 30, 2019
Nigeria and the US: A Tale of Two Energy Economies
When last we visited the topic of Nigerian energy markets and happenings, the reason that Nigeria simultaneously is energy-rich and energy-poor was illustrated by the ongoing tug of war between the Nigerian government and Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID). This was over a prior agreement for P&ID to build a state-of-the-art natural gas processing plant along…
April 29, 2019
The Paris Agreement and the Costly Pursuit of the Trivial
President Donald Trump on June 1, 2017, announced that the US would exit from the international agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. A final exit cannot take place…
April 10, 2019
Only Approved Climate Change Views Need Apply
Let us behold the “debate” over climate policy now unfolding at the European Union Parliament. Its most prominent feature is a serious effort to deny ExxonMobil (EM) the ability to lobby on climate policy and other related matters with members of the parliament. This effort to redefine debate as non-debate will be voted upon by the parliament at the…
March 25, 2019
The Metastasizing Distortions of Electricity Favoritism
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to meddle in energy markets. The latest tangle began when the federal government and a large number of state governments implemented policies subsidizing and guaranteeing substantial market shares for “renewable” electricity, wind and solar power in particular — technologies that are wildly uneconomic, notwithstanding ubiquitous assertions to…
February 28, 2019
USMCA Will Help Us Make the Most of Our Energy Resources
Natural resources are an important component of national wealth, and the efficient allocation and use of those resources is an economic process yielding enormous benefits for ordinary people. Also axiomatic is the reality that international trade — the movement of resources, intermediate inputs and goods and services across international boundaries in response to market signals…