“Epstein explains in philosophical terms how the public has been duped by the likes of Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Amory Lovins, and Bill McKibben for decades. Their real agenda has never been to save the world but instead to promote an idyllic view of nature untrammeled by humans. They have fooled the public into fearing fossil fuels, by focusing only on the risks of fossil fuel usage to mankind and nature, while ignoring all the benefits.”
In his new book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein makes one of the most compelling arguments for the moral value of fossil fuels and the need to increase their use that we have ever read. Although virtually everyone battling the anthropogenic global warming delusion takes a defensive position with regard to the world’s use of coal, natural gas, and oil, our so-called fossil fuels, Epstein recognizes that, as in sports, the best defense is a good offense.…
Continue ReadingEditor note: Yesterday’s post summarized The American Energy Renaissance Act of 2014, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) and Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Ok) last year. Today’s post summarizes a model bill authored by the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance several years ago. The logic of free-market policy does not change but becomes stronger with time and change. But judge for yourself–and add (in comments) any suggestions you might have.
The Obama Administration has been implementing an anti-energy agenda since becoming President. For the last six years, Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” has worked to increase the cost of traditional energy to reduce usage and try to make uneconomic consumer-rejected energy (wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles) more economic.
Even before Obama, multiple-hundred-page interventionist legislation has been signed time and again by Republican presidents.…
Continue Reading“[This legislation] will prevent federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing, facilitate the expansion of domestic refining capacity, improve processes to develop energy infrastructure, stop EPA overreach and its war on coal, force Congress and the President to approve any new EPA regulations that kill jobs, broaden energy development on federal land, open offshore exploration, expand U.S. energy exports, and dedicate additional revenues to debt reduction.”
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,” wrote Milton Friedman in the 40th anniversary edition of his classic Capitalism & Freedom (1962, 2002). The revered free-market economist continued:
… Continue ReadingWhen that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable” (p.