Many in the energy business, whether or not they support President Obama’s positions on energy and the environment, are likely to think, “Look, the US is a big ship. It cannot be turned around in a couple of years, and even if they tried, you can right the course at the ballot box.”
Actually, you can’t. The United States is still a nation of laws, and without strong political support, the acts of one administration cannot be easily reversed or undone by the next.
But there is more to the story than simple inertia and political head-counts. Each new administration enters with an agenda of positive goals. Spending time and political capital on your predecessor’s agenda can often find its way to the bottom of the to-do list. Moreover, a new president has only a limited circle of advisers.…
Continue ReadingLast December, Texas governor Rick Perry, speaking at a Houston fundraiser, sadly noted how President George W. Bush had lost his way in Washington, D.C. His good friend had compromised his principles and left the nation in a lurch, however unintentionally.
But then the governor launched into his Texas-is-great stump speech that included kudos to windpower, a new large industry (no) thanks to a legislative mandate requiring that Texas electricity retailers purchase qualifying renewable energy. (Wind is the most economical of the qualifiers.) The 1999 mandate, enacted with the crucial help of Enron lobbyists, was increased in 2002 with a powerful wind lobby at work. And so at the point of a gun, Texas became the leading windpower state in the country, passing California along the way.
So it was not surprising that last Saturday night Gov.…
Continue ReadingAs 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. …
Continue Reading