“Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”
– Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), three years ago.
The American Automobile Association predicts that 38 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, the second highest in history. Affordable, reliable, widely available gasoline and diesel is a big reason. And maybe Americans are fleeing their economic woes under the current Administration.
While we wait for the anti-energy, glass-emptying Center for American Progress (not Prosperity) to psychologically retool, the rest of us can be optimistic.
“The owner [of the Lake Pulaski solar project], multinational conglomerate Enel Green Power, recently clear-cut hundreds of mature hardwood trees to make way for tens of thousands of solar panels later this summer. Angry residents posted dozens of photos of the carnage on the township’s Facebook page, too late to save 11 acres of maple, ash and oak from the chainsaw.”
It’s a given that solar power is unreliable as a source of base load power to meet our daily energy requirements. After all, the sun—at best—shines some of the time. Great River Energy’s experimental solar array in the Twin Cities, for example, operated at 13.6 percent of capacity in 2014. The utility recorded overcast skies a full 70 percent of days, observing clear and sunny conditions just 10 percent of the year.…
Continue ReadingTwenty years ago, Rob Bradley, then president and now CEO of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), published a two-volume, two-thousand-page history of hydrocarbon regulation, legislation, economics, and politics from the mid-1800s to the mid-1980s. Titled Oil, Gas & Government: The U.S. Experience, Bradley’s treatise puts many of today’s energy issues in historical context.
On April 1, 1996, I wrote about the book in the newsletter I founded and edited, Natural Gas Week. I started my column, dubbed Perspective, by quoting philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Today, 20 years later, I would urge current legislators and regulators to consider the main takeaways of Bradley’s book before casting another vote or initialing another regulatory memo.
In his book, Bradley said that political motivations for government intervention are “narrow and self-interested, not necessarily in the common good and not necessarily representative of the citizenry.”…
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