Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has found another disguise for lining the pockets of “alternative energy” producers with consumers’ dollars directed there not by rational economic choices but by government mandate.
Once a supporter of cap and trade, Graham now supports a “Clean Energy Standard” that would require utilities to generate increasingly high percentages of electricity from “renewable” sources like wind, solar, and biofuels, from nuclear, and from coal using “carbon capture and sequestration”—catching the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted when coal burns and forcing it, under pressure, into deep geological formations for long-term storage to keep it out of the atmosphere.
A variation on that theme suggested by Entergy Corp. head Wayne Leonard in the Wall Street Journal suggests that we begin with the seemingly innocuous step of increasing U.S.…
Continue Reading[Note: Last summer, philosophy professor Stephen Hicks (website here) interviewed MasterResource founder Rob Bradley. “The Robert L. Bradley Jr. Interview, ‘Enron and Political Entrepreneurship'” covers Bradley’s intellectual career and worldview regarding the market order and energy.
This series (in four parts: Part II, Part III, Part IV) is the full interview (with some elaboration), from which an abbreviated version was published in KAIZEN magazine (Issue 13: August 2010) and a longer version was posted online.]
Introduction
Rob Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years. As director of public policy analysis for his last seven years there, he wrote speeches for the late Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in 2005 of fraud and conspiracy.
Bradley is also founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…
Continue ReadingThose who are not yet convinced that government is vastly less efficient than private enterprise should closely examine the nation’s transit industry. In 1964, the industry was mostly private and earned an overall profit. In that year, Congress gave local governments incentives to take over transit, and by 1970, the industry was nearly all publicly owned.
Today it loses nearly $40 billion a year.
In that time, the industry has seen a spectacular decline in productivity. According to data published by the American Public Transportation Association, the industry’s chief lobby group, between 1970 and 2008, inflation-adjusted operating costs more than quadrupled, while transit ridership grew by about 40 percent. In the same time period, the number of annual transit riders carried per operating employee fell by nearly 50 percent. As economist Charles Lave observed, “It’s uncommon to find such a rapid productivity decline in any industry.”…
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