“I can’t downplay this. It’s obviously very exciting for us…. This is opening up a new chapter in Alaska’s oil and gas history that is literally starting today.”
– Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska. Quoted in Jennifer A. Dlouhy, “Shell Begins Drilling Well off Alaska,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 2012.
Profit-seeking, consumer-directed business is proper, necessary, and heroic. Free-market-based energy enterprises (oil, gas, and coal) are quite unlike government-dependent (crony) businesses (ethanol, windpower, and on-grid solar). Ken Lay’s Enron is (was) a leading example of the latter; Koch Industries’ Charles Koch, writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, epitomizes the former.
Shell has scaled back its (scarcely profitable) renewable energy investments and is back to its oil and gas roots. Its advertising is no longer about pie-in-the-sky energies and more about here, now energy.…
Continue ReadingSeven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln spoke about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful, unelected and unaccountable executive-branch agencies.
Consider the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), arguably the most intrusive administrative agency of all. Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, we have, at best, government of, by, and for some people. Or in the words of one public-choice economist, a government “of the Busy (political activists), by the Bossy (government managers), for the Bully (lobbying activists).” [1]
Secretary Jackson seeks not merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives.…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: This interview of Alex Epstein was conducted by Jordan McGillis, a graduate student at Seton Hall University. Mr. Epstein, a philosopher, has expanded the energy debate in recent years by adding a moral and interpretive dimension to classical energy-policy debates.]
1. It’s been objectively demonstrated that practices such as frac’ing produce abundant, affordable, and reliable energy, and yet, they are virulently resisted by much of the public. Why, despite the evidence of frac’ing’s value, is it, along with other productive practices, so loathed? Are there some underlying political or philosophical ideas at work here?
I think it’s important to make a distinction between the opposition of environmentalist leaders and the opposition of those duped by their claims. The vast majority of Americans would certainly embrace hydraulic fracturing if they understood what it did, how it works, and what the (remarkably small) risks are vs.