“Strange bedfellows (akin to Baptists and Bootleggers) support government-promoted electrification: electric utilities and environmentalists.”
“Because a gas ban has virtually no effect on global climate and is likely to increase energy costs for consumers, one would have to look far to find a governmental action that is so intrusive, imbalanced and detrimental to society’s welfare.”
Political attempts to curtail gas supply and demand have met with limited success. Methane rules, drilling restrictions on public land, and opposition to new pipelines have incrementally slowed the growth of natural gas in the United States. But the radical anti-fossil-fuel lobby and their government allies want much more: moratoriums on new gas service and bans on natural gas usage and appliances.
Bans by municipal jurisdictions with (presumably) the legal authority to do so are in the news.…
Continue ReadingThis post reproduces a short q&a with The Atlas Society on how the worldview of Ayn Rand and Objectivism influenced me personally and as a scholar interested in energy, history, political economy, and public policy. [For more information, see “The Fall of Ken Lay: An Interview with Former Enron Insider Robert Bradley Jr.” (April 1, 2006) and “Political Capitalism: Warnings and Reality” (February 4, 2013)
I am a classical-liberal intellectual, or at least a student of classical liberalism.
I specialize in energy history and public policy. That has led me to business/government cronyism. And that had led to trying to understand contra-capitalism as it applies to organizational failure.…
Continue ReadingNote: On this day in 2001, the politically correct, all-things-to-all-people Enron entered the workweek in bankruptcy. Monday December 2nd was my last day at the company after a 16-year career there, as it was for several thousand other employees.
Enron, a unique story of corporate strategy and governance gone wrong, has been misinterpreted by the Progressive mainstream. The company represented the failure of political capitalism, not market capitalism. Its lessons extend to image environmentalism and renewable energy hyperbole, as I document in my book series on the company, as well as in shorter articles.
Reprinted below for the historical record is an email from John Jennrich, founding editor of Natural Gas Week, to Enron author John Emshwiller and myself. Jennrich discusses Enron’s role in the development of the modern natural gas market.…
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