“Jimmy Carter was right in exhorting Americans to turn down their thermostats, even if he did look nerdy in a cardigan while urging us to do so.”
“An energy crisis is again upon us. Soaring gasoline prices and oil imports are daggers aimed at the heart of our stumbling economy.”
– Joseph Wheelan, “Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?” (July 2008).
It’s back to Jimmy Carter with the Biden/Harris (or Harris/Biden) ticket. The Democrats might not admit as much, but the “soft energy path” of the 1970s is back in vogue with climate change replacing fears of oil and gas depletion and of oil imports.
Consider this piece by Joseph Wheelan, “Is it Safe Now to Admit Jimmy Carter Was Right?” (July 2008) that with some updating on the villains could pass for an op-ed today.…
Continue ReadingEd. Note: Back in May 2012, David Boaz of the Cato Institute reminisced about Robert Bradley’s 1996 treatise on oil and gas. His post follows:
At MasterResource, a free-market energy blog, Alex Epstein posts a glowing tribute to the 1996 Cato book Oil, Gas, and Government by Robert L. Bradley, Jr. (who happens to be a co-blogger at MasterResource). Oil, Gas, and Government is surely the longest book Cato ever published, and nobody knows better than I do—well, Rob Bradley does—how much work went into researching, writing, editing, and publishing it.
In these days of blogs and tweets, we’re used to consuming information in very small bites. But one of the fundamental roles of think tanks is to produce long-form research, not just talking points and congressional briefings. And Oil, Gas, and Government is very long form—1,997 pages in two volumes.…
“Cal-ISO reported for August 14 … a sudden, unplanned 1,098-megawatt ‘forced’ loss of wind power on that day from the Alta Wind Energy Center in Tehachapi serving Southern California….”
“Cal-ISO formed a Western regional Energy Imbalancing Market in 2014 … to provide power during its daily ‘two-hour energy crisis’ at sunset when solar power cuts out (called the Duck Curve).”
Writing in Forbes magazine online, journalist Ken Silverstein claims that “Green Energy is Not Among the Culprits Behind California’s Energy Crisis”. Who is this author, and what is his logic and evidence?
Silverstein has written several non-fiction titles for Verso Books, a publishing house dedicated to radical leftism. He is one of the promulgators of the media myth that Enron caused the California Energy Crisis of 2001, notwithstanding the Enron officials who were convicted of accounting fraud.…
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