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
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…
By Benjamin Zycher | March 28, 2022
Once an entity with powers limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, the federal government has become a Leviathan, a central practice of which is the legalized theft of private…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 9, 2022
News reports last month about a traffic accident involving former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger noted that he was driving a GMC Yukon, a full-size sport-utility vehicle that decidedly is not among the vehicle…
By Benjamin Zycher | February 3, 2022
Sometimes you really do have to hit the mule between the eyes to get its attention. The mule of interest here is not a drug smuggler, but instead the Federal Energy Regulatory…
By Benjamin Zycher | January 26, 2022
The international climate alarmist industry comprises a number of special interests. There are the activists, fundamentally anti-human and deeply disingenuous, demanding that billions of the global poor suffer and die in order that the planet be “saved.” There are…
By Benjamin Zycher | January 13, 2022
Having floated a possible export ban on crude oil as a trial balloon last month, the Biden administration earlier this week abandoned the idea, as opposition emerged quickly from Democrats in oil-producing districts. But the mere…
By Benjamin Zycher | December 16, 2021