“Energy policy will be on the ballot this fall, and American voters deserve meaningful answers from all candidates about how to drive production of affordable and reliable natural gas and oil for decades to come.” – American Petroleum Institute

The American Petroleum Institute (API) is no better or worse than its membership. If the companies like the free market, they are on solid consumer, taxpayer grounds. If the membership tilts toward special government favor (rent-seeking), API works against consumers and taxpayers.

Oil and gas companies should work from fundamental consumer demand out rather than political correctness in. They would have avoided boondoggles like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the 1970s and hydrogen and carbon capture today. They also should have fought hard against wind and solar for on-grid electricity and for batteries to overcome intermittency.

Today, API has many free-market views, given the Biden-Harris Administration’s anti-oil-and-gas agenda, 250 actions (and counting) worth.…

Ed. Note: This is Part 3 of a six-part series. “America’s Enlightenment Heritage” (Part 1) is here; “Conservation vs. Preservation” (Part 2) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.

“America’s Enlightenment Heritage” (Part 1) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “Philosophic Conflict” (Part 4) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.

“Why is it that any touch of Man upon nature is to be regarded as a violation and desecration? What is the distinctive aspect of human nature that so offends the environmentalists?”

Today, the most consistent expression of environmentalism’s misanthropic view can be found in the so-called “animal rights movement,” which emerged with the publication in 1975 of philosopher Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation.…

“We have long discovered that nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.” (- Ronald Reagan)

In the 1970s – fifty years ago now – The Energy Crisis jolted the U.S. economy, causing shortages and long lines at gas stations. In response, various federal energy policies and programs were passed. And as the decades passed, layer-upon-layer of new federal energy programs and regulations were added, then extended and expanded.

The energy crisis is decades past, and technology advances in oil and natural gas drilling have yielded booming supplies, allowing the U.S. to become a major oil and natural gas exporter. So maybe it is time (or past time) to “push the button” to end the dense and expensive thicket of federal energy market interventions (including subsidies and mandates for wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles, plus fuel economy standards).…

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.…