A free-market energy blog

In the latest attempt by anti-shale activists to obscure the facts and disregard evidence, a group called “The Mother’s Project” recently sponsored an ad in the New York Times calling on First Lady Michelle Obama to do whatever she can to “hit the pause button” on hydraulic fracturing.

The group – which was founded by none other than Angela Monti Fox, the mother of Gasland director Josh Fox – alleges that hydraulic fracturing is causing irreversible environmental damage. One of the activists with the group, Sonia Skakich-Scrima, had this to say about the process:

We’re seeing impacts to ground and surface water across the country and in Colorado. Those you can’t fix, they’re not fixable.

It’s unclear who she is referencing by saying “we,” but she’s certainly not referring to state regulators, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or scientists who have proper technical expertise.

As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Here are a few examples why: [Read more →]

“Hansen’s most recent editorial has received sharp criticism for the over-reach of his claims about climate science. But what the media isn’t covering is an unprecedented call for an environmental trade war with America’s largest trading partner. Let’s hope they catch up to that aspect of the story.”

In a recent editorial assault on Canada’s oil-sands, climate activist extraordinaire James Hansen (NASA) has basically declared war on Canada’s economy (not to mention our own). Hansen wrote:

Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

He goes on to suggest that the U.S. actually take actions against the interests of our neighbors to the north:

President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

This is truly astonishing: a high ranking official at NASA has taken to the pages of the New York Times to lobby the President of the United States to physically embargo Canada’s oil, and impose economic sanctions against Canada to force them to eschew tar-sand development and export. [Read more →]

“The way in which even a mature, supposedly quite ‘drilled out’ region—such as the United States—continues to add oil and gas reserves confirms the crucial influence of technological change and questions whether the very notion of fixed stocks and exhaustibility has much value in resource supply analysis. After all, industry operators do not regard their reserves as nonrenewable: they will invest in exploration and development to create new capacity.”

- G. C. Watkins, “The Hotelling Principle: Autobahn or Cul de Sac?,” The Energy Journal, Vol. 13-1, 1992, pp. 22-23.

The gains in U.S. crude oil production in just the past four years have been impressive. Here is where those gains are coming from.

U.S. crude oil production, after sinking to levels not seen since the mid-1940s, rose more than half a million barrels per day between 2007 and 2011. That size of increase has not been witnessed in the U.S. for more than forty years.

The source of that large gain certainly did not occur in the federal offshore, which, with 2011’s unusually sharp drop of nearly 240,000 barrels per day netted an increase of just under 30,000 barrels per day over the four-year period. It was onshore (including state waters) where production r0se from a 2007 low of 3.7 million barrels per day to 4.3 million barrels per day, a surge of some 570,000 barrels per day.

This increase does not even include the jump in the nation’s output of natural gas liquids (NGLs), which reached a record 2.18 million barrels per day in 2011 – an increase of 400,000 barrels per day since 2007.

NGLs and crude oil increases together yield a gain of nearly 1 million barrels per day in just four years – an increase of nearly 15 percent. And these increased barrels mean increased jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans now employed in oil and gas development and support activities has grown by more than 100,000 in five years – from 344,000 jobs in mid-2007 to 454,100 in March 2012.

Zeroing in on Crude Gains

The accompanying chart breaks out crude oil production’s increases and declines for major states and federal offshore regions. Texas and North Dakota clearly stand out as major forces behind the increase, with 373,000 b/d and 296,000 b/d gains, respectively, between 2007 and 2011. But 15 other states (including a 40,000 barrels per day net rise for the Gulf’s federal offshore) collectively account for another 200,000 barrels per day. [Read more →]

“This may be less a rebranding than a full-scale retreat. The message that the climate is falling around mankind’s head … has failed to gain much political traction across the nation. In the process, the environmental movement has lost much of its luster and credibility.”

National environmental groups, conceding that global warming has lost much of its heat as a political issue, are now engaged in what the political online magazine Politico describes as a “rebranding.” Says Politico, “There’s been a change in climate for Washington’s greenhouse gang, and they’ve come to this conclusion: To win, they have to talk about other topics, like gas prices and kids choking on pollutants.”

For the power business, this could turn out to be a positive development. It might expunge carbon dioxide from the regulatory libretto and refocus the ongoing opera bouffe on familiar themes. Perhaps we can drop the self-reverential handwringing about “carbon footprint” and worry about real, tangible, legally defined nasties such as SO_x, NO_x, and rocks.

Full Retreat?

This may be less a rebranding than a full-scale retreat. The message that the climate is falling around mankind’s head, pushed by environmental groups and former Vice President Al Gore for more than a decade, has failed to gain much political traction across the nation. In the process, the environmental movement has lost much of its luster and credibility. [Read more →]

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

A consensus of the world’s leading scientific bodies and governments has proved that our current way of life, in which individuals can produce, consume, and procreate as they choose, is unsustainable and self-destructive. We must, therefore give the government the power it needs to end the threat that we pose to ourselves.

This is, of course, the central narrative of the Green movement’s call for a ban (partial or total) on the lifeblood of industrial civilization, hydrocarbons, in the name of preventing global warming.

To many Americans, this narrative seems airtight. The “consensus” of “science” is portrayed as a virtually unanimous collection of ruthlessly objective minds all independently arriving at the same inexorable conclusion from the same unambiguous data.

But if they read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin, they will not only learn some of the fallacies of the global warming narrative in particular, they will see that this exact narrative of a “scientific” claim that freedom is unsustainable has been used in the past to promote coercive population control and eugenics policies, killing millions and bringing misery to millions more.

They will also see that the “scientific consensuses” of the past–that the earth can only hold so many people, or that freedom of procreation leads to a disastrous design in the gene pool–were utter pseudo-science. And, most importantly, they will understand how this was possible: the “scientists” in question were steeped in and corrupted by a deeply false philosophy–the same philosophy underlying the Green movement today. [Read more →]

The debate surrounding the Production Tax Credit (PTC) intensified last quarter following several high-profile attempts by Congress to extend the credit before it expires at year-end. Industry warnings of precipitous declines in clean-tech investment and imminent job losses have reached a fevered pitch. The New York Times, for example, reflexively accused budget-hawks in Congress of being preoccupied with safeguarding the dominance of the oil and gas industries.

The idea that wind, which represents less than 3% of total electricity generation in the country after huge taxpayer benefits and state mandates, could threaten the continued use of fossil fuels in electric generation is fantasy. It  demonstrates a general ignorance about wind energy’s purpose and its limited contribution to our energy portfolio.

While we might forgive a newspaper editor’s misunderstanding of the complexities of renewable energy policy, it’s quite another thing to see the same level of ignorance on display on Capitol Hill by the very people tasked with understanding and voting on these policies.

Last month, the House Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures invited fellow House members to speak on behalf of bills they introduced or co-sponsored that would extend more than sixty expiring tax provisions, including the PTC. Of the nearly thirty witnesses who testified, one-third pressed for immediate extension of the credit. [Read more →]

The following was published at Econlib (Library of Economics and Liberty by Rob Bradley with the editorial help of David R. Henderson.

A website project of Liberty Fund, Econlib offers concise, online classical-liberal scholarship for “students, teachers, researchers, and aficionados of economic thought.”

Mineral resources, not synthetically producible in human time frames,1 are fixed in the earth. As each is mined, less supply remains, suggesting that cost and, thus, price must increase as production cumulates.

Yet, for virtually all minerals, the opposite seems to be true: As more is mined, more is discovered to be mined. Prices and costs do not inexorably rise. What was high-cost yesterday has become lower-cost, undercutting the perennial complaint that “the easy stuff has been found.” Overall, there seems to be little difference between minerals and general goods and services.

The mineral paradox is explainable if we recognize that human ingenuity in market settings is the ultimate resource, as Julian Simon stated. Entrepreneurial discovery is open-ended. Applied to minerals, resourceship can and does find supply that, before, no one knew existed—or that no one considered exploitable. But incentives and, thus, institutions can make all the difference between potential and plenty. [Read more →]

Ending industrial wind subsidies is a quadruple win: it fosters real jobs, promotes economic growth, protects endangered species, and elevates environmental values over image-making.

The public is coming to this view, not only energy realists. In the face of repeated efforts to extend (seemingly perpetual) wind energy subsidies by industry lobbyists, taxpayers and grass root environmentalists have said: ENOUGH.

Informed and inspired by a loose but growing national coalition of groups opposed to more giveaways with no scientifically proven net benefits, thousands of citizens called their senators and representatives – and rounded up enough Nay votes to run four different bills aground. For once, democracy worked.

A shocked American Wind Energy Association and its allies began even more aggressive recruiting of well-connected Democrat and Republican political operatives and cosponsors – and introducing more proposals like HR 3307 to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC).

Parallel efforts were launched in state legislatures, to maintain mandates, subsidies, feed-in tariffs, renewable energy credits, and other “temporary” ratepayer and taxpayer obligations. [Read more →]

As part of its effort to create dialogue with the American people on environmental issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently launched a project in conjunction with SMITH Magazine, Six Words for the Planet.

The project, officially housed at this site, invites all citizens of the world to submit a six-word essay describing their feelings about Earth.

“Healthier families, cleaner communities, stronger America,” writes EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in her own offering. Other submissions from within EPA include the existential (“Many Nations. One Planet. Our Home.”) and haikuesque admonishment (“Breathe; A Moment in Nature. Breathe!”)

Catalyzing conversation about environmental topics is certainly not out of bounds like a lot of other things the agency has been doing–and caught doing. But most people have concerns that go beyond the (improving) environment.

Many have legitimate concerns about the national economy, our struggle to create and sustain quality jobs, and the affordability of energy for businesses and families. Everyday concerns where progress has turned into regress.

It is these concerns that EPA needs to hear, especially since the agency is actively pursuing regulations and policies that have a tremendous impact on those issues.

Is EPA Listening?

Consider the suite of regulations currently in process at EPA, which together pose billions of dollars in new costs to American consumers and threaten the reliability of America’s power grid. Chief among these is Utility MACT, a new regulation that will negatively affect coal-fired power plants across the nation.

Proponents of a robust American power portfolio have pointed out that the potential of accelerated closures of coal-fired plants caused by Utility MACT could mean that power providers nationwide are forced to turn to other energy sources to replace the lost capacity, creating higher consumer costs. [Read more →]

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) were crucial in my intellectual development. Back in the 1970s, when I attended my first FEE and IHS seminars, there were few such gatherings on the political economy of liberty. For some of us students, the timing was just about right for receiving during the summer what we missing at our colleges and universities.

So it was with interest that I read about Cato University 2012.  The July 29–August 3 seminar is a great opportunity for students  of liberty. The redone, spacious Cato Institute at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, will be the venue for the first time in many years.

“In a time of political turbulence, a presidential election, ideological posturing, and so much more,” the announcement  reads, “our nation’s capital is the perfect setting for examining the roots of our commitment to liberty and limited government and for exploring the ideas and values on which the American republic was founded.”

Continuing:

A key feature of the Summer Seminar is the people. The enthusiasm and openness of the attendees is what really makes Cato University the one-of-a-kind event it is every year. Because we hope you’ll be able to join us in Washington, we wanted to be sure you had an early opportunity to learn the details and register.

The six-day seminar, which is highlighted by a Capitol Hill dinner with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), features some top libertarian thinkers/talks as these: [Read more →]