A Free-Market Energy Blog

How Much Will Obama’s Oil-and-Gas Tax Policy Cost Us? We Can Stop Guessing Now

By Donald Hertzmark -- June 2, 2009

Over the past year, as the party in power has proposed one restrictive measure after another for the oil and gas production industry, analysts have been busy guessing how much this would cost us in foregone production and tax revenue. In an analysis featuring welcome candor, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has estimated oil and gas production in the United States with and without restrictions. By the end of the next decade (2019), restrictive permitting and tax policies will reduce the potential annual government tax take from oil and gas production by more than the total expected yield of the Obama tax program in the oil and gas sector. In the ten years to 2019, the time-frame used in the government’s tax increase proposal, restrictions and new taxes will have reduced the tax take from oil and gas production by more than $118 billion, or about 4 times the expected yield of the new taxes.…

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“Repower Texas”: Taxpayers, Ratepayers, Economic Energy Producers Beware!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 1, 2009

“It will be possible to achieve a 100% clean power mix over the next ten years if appropriate policies are put in place to unleash the [zero carbon source] technologies’ vast potential.”

– Repower America (The Alliance for Climate Protection)

The heavily bankrolled climate alarmist/energy coercion lobby, led by Al Gore’s new national organization Repower America, is coming to a town or city near you!

In Houston, they have arrived. The “Repower Texas” campaign is being fronted by a group of government-dependent political capitalists that see Big Green (as in money) in Texas’s renewable energy mandates. And how did this business underclass get started? It began with the Ken Lay/Enron renewables mandate for the Lone Star State in 1999, and the policy begun by then-governor George W. Bush is being continued today by governor Rick Perry.…

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Energy Reality Wins at Exxon Mobil Annual Meeting (Atlas is not shrugging at this substance-over-form company)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 30, 2009

If only the United States economy were as strong as ExxonMobil. If only energy realism and free-market consumer service were guiding lights in Austin, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and other seats of political power.

The good news from Exxon Mobil’s annual stockholders meeting in Dallas earlier this week is that the company is focused on its core competencies amid the energy politicization around it. No Enron political machinations here!

In fact, Exxon Mobil is the anti-Enron of corporate America, a rebuff to Ken Lay, who once worked at Exxon, and Jeff Skilling, who declared in 2000: “You will see the collapse and demise of the integrated energy companies around the world. They are going to break up into thousands and thousands of pieces.” (1)

Key Messages

The key messages of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson were: 

  1. Petroleum as a primary energy source is the future, not only the recent past.
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Smart Grid: Can ‘Smart Metering’ Overcome the Hassle Factor? (transaction costs matter too)

By -- May 29, 2009
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The New MIT Climate Study: A Real World Inversion?

By Chip Knappenberger -- May 28, 2009
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Houston Chronicle: Climate Alarmism and Policy Activism, but no Economic Analysis

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 27, 2009
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Unilateral or Worldwide, Waxman-Markey Fails Standard Cost/Benefit Tests (CO2 “leakage” makes bad even worse)

By Robert Murphy -- May 26, 2009
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Waxman-Markey Clothier for the Emperor: A Climate Parable (response to RealClimate)

By Chip Knappenberger -- May 23, 2009
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“Best Science” and the Problem of Land-based Thermometers (Anthony Watts’s Surfacestations project)

By Indur Goklany -- May 22, 2009
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“The Unbearable Lightness of Wind” (EU update)

By Ross McCracken -- May 21, 2009
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