Editor Note: Dr. Ebeling’s two-part post (Part I yesterday) provides the necessary background to understand how debt reduction is driving energy policy. Regarding the budget fight, E&E News (see Appendix) reported yesterday: “As the proverbial eleventh hour looms for the nation’s maxed-out debt limit, this week brings energy-policy battles of all sizes — from how to divide offshore-drilling revenue to the lessons gleaned from recent oil spills — that will play out amid the larger fiscal showdown.”
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… Continue Reading“Austria was successful in pushing through policies that are popular all over the world. Austria has the most impressive records in five lines: she increased public expenditures, she increased wages, she increased social benefits, she increased bank credits [monetary expansion], she increased consumption. After all these achievements she was on the verge of ruin.”
[Editor Note: Obama’s transformationist energy policy, enabled by taxpayer largesse, is being whipsawed by the federal deficit crisis. And the energy/environmental statists are running scared. “[Obama] has bought into and reinforced the GOP narrative that debt and spending concerns reign supreme,’ lamented Joe Romm at Climate Progress, “which will undermine short-term and long-term efforts to create jobs or promote clean energy or reduce oil dependence or cut carbon pollution.”
Today and tomorrow, economist Richard Ebeling outlines the macro crisis. On Wednesday, Lisa Linowes of Wind Action makes a case for ending all energy subsidies as a contribution toward fiscal reform.]
The economic crisis through which the United States and much of the rest of the world are now passing is not another supposed instance of the “failure” of unrestrained capitalism.…
Continue Reading[Editor Note: Carter’s April 1977 energy speech was also reproduced and commented upon at MasterResource.]
Thirty-two years ago today, President Carter and his energy advisor James Schlesinger got it all wrong in an emergency television address to the nation. Their neo-Malthusian, government-as-engineer moment should never be forgotten but stand as timeless warning about the anti-market, anti-energy mentality.
In the summer of 1979, many Americans were stuck in the gasoline lines. There was a lot of lost time and nervousness. There was fighting and worse. The market as a buffer of civility was gone. Americans were not used to such a predicament and had the common sense to know that something was very abnormal and not to be tolerated. They were mad.
Here is the background of his energy speech, considered as the most important speech of his presidency:
… Continue ReadingOn June 30, 1979, a weary Jimmy Carter was looking forward to a few days’ vacation in Hawaii, as Air Force One sped him away from a grueling economic summit in Tokyo.