“Generally, I’d like to be remembered for helping to form a better connection and awareness between innovation and free markets and the tremendous improvements modern energy brings to people. That’s the essence of my progressive nature, so maybe I haven’t strayed to far from my early liberal bent, just on the best ways to achieve good results. Be clear on results versus intentions.”
MasterResource from time to time conducts interviews with leading free-market scholars (see Ken Green here). This completes the Tanton interview, Part I of which was yesterday.
Q. Let’s turn from traditional pollutants to climate change. What work have you done here?
TT: My focus has been more on policies that strive to address emissions, rather than climate modeling. I’ll leave that to those more qualified, as long as they adhere to scientific process.…
Continue Reading“I view my 40+ year career as progressions on a common theme; understanding (and promoting) the role of free markets and technology innovation one to the other, both to improve humankind’s’ lot.”
MasterResource from time to time conducts interviews with leading free-market scholars (see Ken Green here). This two-part interview with Tom Tanton continues tomorrow.
Q. Let’s start with your current position and responsibilities.
TT: I’m currently Director of Science and Technology Assessment at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI). I’m also President of my consulting firm T2 and Associates, which stands for “Trust in Technology” not my initials.
EELI is focused on strategic litigation, such as testing the constitutionality of the renewable portfolio standard in Colorado, and on increasing government transparency through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation.…
Continue Reading“Capitalism has a built-in incapacity to generate legitimations of itself, and it is particularly deprived of mythic potency; consequently, it depends upon the legitimating effects of its sheer facticity or upon association with other, non-economic legitimating symbols.”
– Peter Berger, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty
In Part 1 of this two-part series, conventional, market-based electricity was described as inescapably lacking an overarching myth that gives it legitimacy against postmodern renewable energy, global-warming ideology, and energy regulation in California. This insight comes from sociologist Peter L. Berger’s 1986 book The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty.
Given Capitalism’s mythic deprivation, what then can be done, if anything, to re-legitimate cheap, clean or cleaner conventional energy and demythologize renewable energy?
Can Anything Be Done?…
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