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August 29, 2023
No One Is Above the Law? Biden’s Bureau of Land Management Thinks It Is.
One central characteristic of the Biden administration is its contempt for the letter of the law. When laws interfere with overriding political objectives, they are cast aside, and the courts are often forced to clean up the mess. Nowhere is this norm-busting reality more pronounced than at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM),…
August 8, 2023
The IEA and Congressional Opponents of Fossil Fuels Are Chasing Windmills
The Biden administration’s regulatory onslaught is no mere rumor. It’s a harsh reality deeply problematic for the rule of law, for the concept of self-government, for the institutions of our constitutional republic, and for federalism. And, not least, for a U.S. economy subjected to ever-increasing legal burdens, bureaucratic interference, distortions in the productivity of resource use, and metastasizing Beltway mindlessness. But it’s…
May 31, 2023
The EPA Forges Ahead Toward Less Electricity Supply and Greater Electricity Demand
The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is nothing if not ambitious, striving as only a bureaucracy politicized and single-minded can to save the world from the purported ravages of the climate “crisis.” Indeed, the central focus of EPA regulatory efforts is the promulgation of requirements for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that can survive judicial review. A…
March 28, 2023
The Energy Transition Is a Delusion Indeed
The “energy transition” continues to receive thunderous applause from all the usual Beltway suspects, an exercise in groupthink fantasy amazing to behold. For those with actual lives to live and thus uninterested in silliness: The “energy transition” is a massive shift, wholly artificial and politicized, from conventional energy inexpensive (Table 1b and here), reliable, and very clean given the proper policy environment,…
March 28, 2023
Don’t Ban Oil Exports to China
Beltway silliness is as unavoidable as the summer humidity because rent-seeking groups, both economic and ideological, have powerful incentives to advocate legislation that would advance their interests at the expense of the economy in the aggregate. Nor is it difficult to find officeholders to make their arguments for them, even though, or perhaps because, they know better….
March 6, 2023
Biden’s Interior Department Keeps Dragging Its Feet on Offshore Leasing
Notwithstanding some recent declines, domestic crude oil prices in the U.S. are about 45% higher than when President Biden was inaugurated. Global crude oil prices are about 48% higher. U.S. gasoline prices are about a dollar higher per gallon. Indeed, between the inauguration and June 2022, gasoline prices more than doubled. These prices began to increase almost monotonically long before the…
November 21, 2022
Proposals for a Windfall Profits Tax Are Damaging Even if Never Enacted
In the wake of the midterm election results, President Biden has made it clear that “I’m not going to change,” in particular with respect to his view that “the oil companies are really doing the nation a real disservice.” Accordingly, it is easy to predict a continuation of the incoherence of the Biden stance toward conventional energy: a policy environment reducing…
October 6, 2022
Renewables Subsidies and the Institutionalization of Irresponsibility
The joy of spending huge amounts of tax dollars — Other People’s Money — is a truth obvious and eternal, but the corrupting effects of a systemwide shift toward such subventions are more subtle, and vastly more destructive. That is a central implication of the massive policy favoritism now directed toward unconventional electricity — hugely expensive, unreliable,…
September 30, 2022
Letter: Forget Manchin’s Bill. Real Permitting Reform Is Needed.
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 30th, 2022 in response to the Journal’s September 26, 2022 op-ed titled “Both Parties Should Support My Permitting-Reform Bill,” Sen. Joe Manchin’s bill that ostensibly would have speeded up the permitting process for conventional energy projects (“Both Parties Should Support My…
September 27, 2022
The Manchin Permitting Reform Bill Should Be Defeated
Like the deeply destructive “Inflation Reduction Act” that will do no such thing, the “permitting reform” bill (summarized here) released last week by Senator Joe Manchin carries a title — “The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022” — utterly divorced from its actual prospective impacts. Its ostensible objective is the speedier development of conventional energy resources and such ancillary…