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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…
September 20, 2022
Adverse Energy Taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act
The process of political meddling in energy markets is endless, an eternal truth that will not prove different for the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Most public attention has been directed at the massive subsidies and favoritism directed at unconventional electricity — wind and solar power in particular — and electric vehicles, rather than the tax provisions, less…
August 16, 2022
Bill Gates Approves
Always good for a laugh, the New York Times opinion page has few peers as a dependable repository of supreme silliness. Day after day, year after year: It delivers ignorance of basic facts, bad analysis, endless non sequiturs, dishonesty by omission. All of that and more (or less) for a very reasonable price; it truly is the gift that…
August 9, 2022
Banning Exports of Crude Oil and Refined Products Would Increase Prices
A number of perverse Beltway ideas never seem to die despite their underlying fallacies. The latest such nostrum is the argument that a renewed ban on the export of crude oil and refined products would reduce domestic fossil-energy prices, as asserted in a recent letter to President Biden from four U.S. senators urging Biden to “preserve petroleum supplies…