“Waxman-Markey … seeks a first in economic history: rationing without scarcity or price inflation. [It] allows generous ‘offsets’ so that carbon-based energy does not, in fact, become scarce. The bill does, however, contain a multitude of new regulations, product-efficiency mandates, and spending programs that will require extensive managerial attention from both the public and private sectors, though to much less effect than promised.”
– Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green, July 2009
The Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House of Representatives is a great illustration of how the government can take an idea that sounds good in theory – emission trading – and turn it into a nightmarish piece of legislation that is larded with pork; perverted by special-interest horse-trading; and will most likely be not only ineffective, but will produce perverse and negative consequences for both the economy and the environment.…
A death announcement last week in the Houston Chronicle caught my eye. I never met the late Stephen Simon, but what I read made me realize that the quiet heroes and heroines of free-market capitalism need to be saluted now and then. For they are the wealth creators and real philanthropists versus the political system’s wealth redistributionists and wealth destroyers.
Here is the essence of this man. An engineer. More than 40 years with a major energy company in a variety of advancing positions at home and abroad. Successful. Private sector philanthropist with his time and money.
And through it all, a “heroic capitalist” in the Smith-Smiles-Rand tradition (see Part I of my Capitalism at Work). A practitioner of Principled Entrepreneurship ™.
Think of what Julian Simon would have said about Stephen Simon (no relation): He created more than he consumed to leave us resource richer.…
In quick succession, the Obama administration has dealt a near-death blow to new civilian nuclear reactors in the U.S.
First, the Yucca Mountain Project, a waste storage facility in Nevada, was “zeroed-out” of the 2009 budget. Second, the administration has just ended U.S. participation in a new nuclear fuel recycling project, one that would extract more energy from existing fission energy sources, and reduce sharply the high level nuclear waste from nuclear power.
Presiding over both of these decisions–that effectively terminate the feasibility of new nuclear power plants for the U.S.–is Dr. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Nobel Laureate in Physics, and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Energy Laboratory.
In contrast to the crowing of Senator Harry Reid about “killing” the Yucca Mountain Waste storage project, Dr. Chu described nuclear fuel recycling as an essential element of nuclear power for the U.S.,…