Ed note: The extract below from a Joint Economic Committee Staff Report briefly describes the end of oil price and allocation regulation in 1981, righting one of the worst energy fiascos in U.S. history. This experience has taken price controls off the political table ever since with petroleum, including today with the Iran War. [“President Reagan’s Economic Legacy,” Section C: Energy Shortages and Regulatory Failures]

In the 1970s, OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was temporarily successful in driving up energy prices and hitting consumer wallets worldwide. OPEC’s manipulations of oil supplies were turned into a full-scale energy crisis in the United States because of price controls in energy markets.

Rising oil prices hurt consumers, but long lines at gas stations and shortages of heating oil were the work of bad policy, not of markets.…

Ed. Note: Five years ago, Storm Uri caused Texas’s centrally planned wholesale electricity market (ERCOT) to buckle, vindicating warnings about the state’s wind/solar reliance. The mainstream media implicated natural gas instead, failing to explore the why behind the why. Rather than deregulation, Texas post-Uri has chosen to add wind, solar, and batteries, while subsidizing natural gas plants to counter intermittency. This duplicated grid is now driving rates up in a state that could have relied on surplus natural gas instead.

It was not so much the story of freak weather triggering a market failure writ large. It was a classic application of the political economy of government intervention: the seen and the unseen, expert/regulatory failure, and unintended consequences. Don Lavoie, a preeminent thinker in the field of market-versus-government planning, once warned:

If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide—and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system—then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.” 

“’The [Sunnova] summit [last November] was really part of the swindle,’ said Chris Pélissié, chief executive at Senga Solar, which is owed more than $680,000 by Sunnova. ‘None of us dealers knew we were playing chess until it was just too late’…” (below)

Previous posts at MasterResource (below) have chronicled the government-enabled rooftop solar industry, which is now in distress. Bankrupt Sunnova Energy heads the list, with others either bankrupt or struggling.

• Sunnova Declares Bankruptcy June 10, 2025
• Sunnova EVP’s Exit: Self-adulation Within a Taxpayer Bubble June 4, 2025
• Sunnova Hype pre-Bankruptcy May 8, 2025
• Sunnova’s Net Zero for Stockholders (last ESG report of a ‘second-hander’ company) May 7, 2025
• John Berger: “Lifetime Achievement Award” for Sustainable Energy Future April 1, 2025
• Sunnova Going Solyndra? (Enron-ex John Berger owes taxpayers a bundle) February 12, 2025
• Sunnova’s Rooftop Solar: Selling a Bad Product Requires ….

“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”

In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).

Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…