As mentioned in a post yesterday, Cato just published a rather encylopedic Cato Handbook for Policymakers.  Text is due from contributing authors around August, and the tome is published in January to coincide with the arrival of a new Congress (or, when we’re on a four year cycle, at the beginning of the new presidential term).  It’s a nice set of policy discussions and a handy one-stop-shop for what we think Congress ought to do on a number of policy fronts.

My energy chapter, submitted in August, coincided with the peak of the hysteria about oil and gas prices, foreign oil dependence, offshore oil development (“Drill Baby Drill!”), and rampaging congressional search & destroy operations to root out the speculators theoretically at the root of the price spiral.  Hence, my essay was about why oil prices were going up and what Congress could do about it. …