“The [Houston Chronicle’s] editorial positions have moved in a decidedly liberal and environmentalist direction since its parent, the Hearst Corporation, installed new management in 2002.”
– Bill Dawson, Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, December 3, 2007.
“One factor [in the industry retrenchment] could be the fate of climate change legislation in Congress, which could add costs to oil and gas producers, refiners, chemical makers and other parts of the energy sector, forcing them to cut jobs. Susan Combs, Texas comptroller of public accounts said: “I think there’s a big bull’s-eye painted on Houston.”
– Brett Clanton, “Big Oil’s Lean Look Fuels Area Jobs Fear,” Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2009.
Cap-and-trade, even in a watered down beginning, isn’t good for Houston. But the Houston Chronicle has been at the forefront of advocating for such open-ended regulation–even rejecting a sober cost-benefit analysis of the issue.…
Editor note: This piece is reproduced from the website www.politicalcaptitalism.org with the permission of the author. This post, the first in a series, is germane to the current debate over climate/energy legislation that is backed by a number of large U.S. corporations (Enron then; GE, Duke, DuPont, etc. now).
Political capitalism is a private-property, market-oriented system that is compromised by business-sponsored government intervention. It is a socioeconomic system in which many or most regulations, subsidies, and tax-code provisions result from the lobbying efforts of directly affected businesses and their allies.
Today in the United States, there is greater political transparency and competition between political elites than was evident in the business-dominated past (the 19th and most of the 20th centuries). Interventions routinely result from non-business special interests representing education, the environment, labor, minorities, religion, retirees, science, and taxpayers, among others.…
“The use of wind power is as old as history.”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 62.
“The Federal Power Commission became interested in the Grandpa’s Knob [windpower] experiment during World War II, and commissioned Percy H. Thomas, a senior engineer of the commission, to investigate the potential of wind power production for the entire country. Thomas’ survey, Electric Power from the Wind, was published in March 1945.”
– Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 545.
Last week I posted on the long history of solar energy to make the point that this technology is not an infant industry. The fact that solar cannot compete against grid electricity (off grid is another matter) today is proof positive that there is an inherent disadvantage with the dilute, intermittent flow of sunlight in the thriving carbon-based energy era.…