“A recent Politico article on the bad messaging of Democrats on climate and energy, Democrats Bite on Burgers and Straws–and Republicans Feast, is fair warning. It is high time the hometown paper of the center of the oil and gas industry stop the blatant bias against the very energies that consumers naturally prefer.”

There is no representation for conservatives or libertarians on the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle. So when it comes to energy, fossil fuels (because of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions) are seen as the enemy of the climate rather than a greening agent; protection against heat, cold, and precipitation; and a first responder after weather extremes.

Mineral energies in capitalist settings have much to do with the precipitous drop of climate-related deaths in the last century–and are essential to human betterment going forward.

“All economic pain and no environmental gain is bad politics coming and going. The Democrats do not seem to want to touch it, if their vote on the Green New Deal was any indication.”

” … history will judge the climate alarm as exaggerated, CO2 as the gas of life, and carbon-based energy and modern living as heaven on earth. Governor Abbott, thank you.”

During the day, Houston, Texas, bustles as the oil and gas capital of the world. The daily business fare as reported by the hometown Houston Chronicle is a new offshore project here, new refinery or petrochemical plant there, new onshore production plays elsewhere.

And then there is a whole new industry within an industry, LNG exports from Texas and Louisiana to distant ports–and even LNG tank cars crossing into Mexico.

“[Business columnist] Chris Tomlinson fails to mention fascist governance as another possibility whereby the means of production are ostensibly in private hands, but serve actively to implement government policy. Crony capitalism comes close to that model as larger corporations do a mating dance melding government funding with government policy, and shut out the less well funded and connected smaller commercial entities, while the hapless public gets taxed to fund the charade.”

Chris Tomlinson‘s columns in the Business section of the Houston Chronicle opine on broadly defined energy issues, especially those with a perceived impact on Houston. He is dismissive of the central role of mineral energies for today’s standard of living and refuses to question climate alarmism (the Dessler effect?). He sees government correction as automatic, as if there were not “government failure” in the quest to address “market failure.”

Some of us miss the more open-minded Loren Steffy, the former business columnist at the Chronicle (see here for examples).

“If it were only so simple to pass a law and increase income and wealth. ‘One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than by their results,’ as the late free -market economist/educator Milton Friedman once said.”

The Houston Chronicle, as yesterday’s post documented, has gone from bad to worse in the hydrocarbon capital of the United States and world. The New York Times of Houston (the proper name for our supposedly hometown paper) seems to be at war with not only Donald Trump but also skeptics of climate alarmism and the free market more generally.

Along with climate-alarmist unsigned editorials, guest editorials, (selected) letters-to-the-editor, and cartoons, the Chronicle is all-in with Progressive notions. Consider the lead editorial on Labor Day, September 4, 2017.