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…
| September 27, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | September 20, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 16, 2022
Numerous news reports have emerged about the reforms to the energy infrastructure permitting process that Senator Joe Manchin has obtained as promises from President Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy…
By Benjamin Zycher | August 5, 2022
Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 20th, 2022 in response to the Journal’s July 9, 2022 op-ed titled “Is a Carbon Tax…
By Benjamin Zycher | July 20, 2022
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is in the process of finalizing its proposed “climate risk” disclosure rule for public companies. But the SEC has a huge amount of work to do,…
By Benjamin Zycher | July 19, 2022
The “Do Something!” imperative so common in the Beltway as a response to the headlines of the day yields economic or policy improvement only rarely if at all. This cannot be…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 30, 2022
President Biden will attend the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Saudi Arabia next month, with the explicit goal of convincing the GCC — that is, the Saudis — to increase production of crude oil…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 21, 2022
Proposals for “carbon pricing” and a border-adjustment tax on imports and credits on exports — the central ancillary policy needed to preserve the competitiveness of U.S. companies given the implementation of…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 16, 2022
Beltway nostrums are a dime a dozen, and the climate problem threat emergency crisis existential threat is tailor-made to elicit hundreds of them. An old one now receiving increasing attention is carbon capture and sequestration…
By Benjamin Zycher | June 9, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 16, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | May 3, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 25, 2022
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,…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 22, 2022
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | April 14, 2022