[Editor Note: MasterResource publishes a variety of energy- and classical liberal-related essays. We are not afraid of the pursuit of truth and certainly have found it. This post by Marc Rauch, vice-president and copublisher of The Auto Channel, presents a provocative thesis about how ethanol was blocked by government policy (taxation and then Prohibition) from capturing major energy markets more than a century ago. Comments are particularly welcome.]
Debates today rage over the ethanol mandate. Be that what it may, there is a market niche for ethanol as an anti-knock agent and an oxygenate to meet clean air standards. But did you know that a market for ethanol, a free-market market, existed or could have developed except for the unintended consequences of a major government intervention?
Prohibitive Taxation
Events of the American Civil War set in stone social and economic conditions that have been with us ever since, and they are certain to be with us long into the foreseeable future. …
Continue Reading“Let’s switch out for a better [climate] policy…. Then conservative activists who continue to be in the denialist camp on climate change will find themselves completely isolated.”
– Jerry Taylor, quoted in “Libertarian Group Takes on Conservatives on Carbon Tax.” Energy & Environmental News (sub. req.), March 3, 2016.
“Alarmists … clearly have decided that the best way to win the global warming debate is by shouting down the opposition and demonizing them in the eyes of the public. But that is not dispassionate scientific debate; it is more like a ‘struggle meeting’ during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
– Jerry Taylor, The Heated Rhetoric of Global Warming, Cato Institute Commentary, September 15, 1997.
Climate ‘denier’ or ‘denialist’ is a term of political hate speech. Recently, it came from a source that for most of the last quarter century was labeled a ‘denier’ by the pugnacious Left. …
Continue Reading“Those rejecting just and reasonable (i.e. ‘rule of law’) fossil-fuel decision-making in the name of ‘climate change, global warming, an ‘”abundance of caution'” or other alibis’, are either ignorant of the realities laid out above or treacherously aware of their effort to undermine the public interest in pursuit of their own accumulation of power.”
In a recent Calgary Herald editorial, Chris Nelson takes on the Quebec hypocrites and enviroactivists stonewalling TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline Project, a 2,858-mile pipeline that would carry 1.1-million barrels/day of crude oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada. Part of the project converts TransCanada’s underutilized natural gas facilities to oil.
Here we stand: the powers out of Quebec have decided to block a market-supported oil pipeline to Alberta, and Edmonton could retaliate by banning Alberta from buying British Columbia’s excess electricity until the national government reverses its pipeline obstructionism.…
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