” … it is our moral responsibility to play a leading role in the response to the threats posed by climate change. Both inaction and unrealistic proposals are insufficient responses. The United States should prioritize actionable policy solutions … for all Americans impacted by climate change and for the betterment of future generations.”
– American Conservation Coalition
“Beware of the American Conservative Coalition…. Christopher Barnard should engage in open debate to demonstrate why the climate is in crisis and why rationing consumer-chosen energy is a workable policy.” (Bradley, below)
With an endless supply of money, the Progressive Left have been creating nonprofits to fracture and weaken the resistance to climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. Many “conservative” or “Republican” or “bipartisan” front groups are doing the incrementalism that tip-toe on the road to serfdom.…
Continue Reading“Although intended to counteract the problems caused by an earlier violation of property rights—the legalized monopoly status that utilities gained under ratebase regulation—the forced opening of the grid was itself a violation of property rights.”
“In the wake of a liberated electric grid based on property rights and private ownership of the rights-of-way, the imaginations, ingenuities, and profit motives of scientists, engineers, and financiers would produce all manner of possibilities.” (Raymond Niles, below)
Raymond C. Niles is one of those people who has “forgotten more than I know.” His insights from 13 years ago in electricity history and policy (one of his many interests in political economy) ring loud in the wake of the Great Texas Electricity Blackout of February 2021.
I recently came across Niles’s May 2008 essay, “Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid,” published in The Objective Standard.…
Continue ReadingMake no mistake: The Great Texas Blackout debacle was a failure of government planning, not the free market.
Here are some quotations in the press about a massive coordination failure of nonintegrated entities, one that could have been avoided with ‘natural gas majors’ and ‘electricity majors’ –vertically and horizontally integrated–coordinating in-house.
Some quotations serving as background for this revisionist perspective follow:
… Continue Reading“The failure of gas and electric companies to communicate with each other–again–demonstrates how, just as Texas’ power grid is a complex web of producers, transporters, deliverers and regulators, its near-collapse last month, too, was an integrated failure spread throughout the system.”
“At the height of the ‘snowpocalypse,” social media teemed with pictures of the power have and have nots–prompting outrage that vacant downtown office buildings had electricity they didn’t need while average citizens endured teeth-chattering cold or worse.”