The Wall Street Journal‘s Marketplace headline of March 5th said much: “Natural Gas to Power Pickups.” The piece did not mention the Nat Gas Act or other special government favors, just an effort by U.S. automakers to get natural-gas-fueled trucks into the mix given the large BTU disparity between gas and gasoline/diesel prices.

Reporter Jeff Bennett described a “growing wave” of interest in natural gas trucks:

On Tuesday, Chrysler Group LLC plans to disclose it will build the first production-line pickup truck powered by natural gas. The auto maker is promising to build at least 2,000 heavy-duty Ram bi-fuel trucks that run on a combination of compressed natural gas and gasoline starting in June.

General Motors Co. on Monday plans to disclose it will offer bi-fuel Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra 2500 pickups in the fourth quarter.

In the closing act, we have the protagonist foisting on the world a set of insights, which we proceeded to dissect in Act II and Act III. Is there a happy ending to our play? Alas, it is a tragedy.

The Bradley Project, which can be overviewed at his website Political Capitalism,  brilliantly narrates the ethos of what he calls “Heroic Capitalism” in contrast with “Political Capitalism.” As applied to energy policy, Bradley is largely correct in his insights that the energy industry has become so mixed up with the mixed economy that corporate leaders legitimately fear that capitalist advocacy will be punished.

As an out-of-the-closet energy policy market advocate, I have often been privately besieged to take public positions that corporations were loath to take publicly because of their fear of regulatory retribution.…

“The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.”

– James Hansen, “Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 1998, p. 12753.

“In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts.”

– James Hansen et al., “How Sensitive Is the World’s Climate?,” National Geographic Research & Exploration, 9(2): 1993, p. 157.

“Climate is always changing. Climate would fluctuate without any change of climate forcings. The chaotic aspect of climate is an innate characteristic of the coupled fundamental equations describing climate system dynamics.”

Call it the iron law of political economy: Government goes to those who show up.

The good news is that limited-government groups are showing up. And they are not pro-industry (such as the natural gas industry) but pro-consumers, pro-taxpayers, and pro-marketplace. The bad news is that too many business leaders–and think T. Boone Pickens in this instance–are using their resources to politicize industry.

Elements of the gas industry want to use special government favor to increase demand and thus prices of their product. A quick summary of the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act was given by the Leftie group DeSmogBlog:

As stated in an earlier article, “The bill is 24-pages long and rewards [natural gas vehicles] with tax [subsidies] to help ‘drive’ consumption. The bigger the vehicle, the more tax credits given.”