“There are far too few heroes and far too many failures in the history of presidential energy politics.”

Who can claim to be a true energy President from a pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, pro-free-market perspective?

Which U.S. heads qualify for an anti-energy label for violating economics 101–and endangering the health and welfare of all of us who rely on the MasterResource?

Of the 30 or so candidates in the Lincoln-to-Biden era (the first commercial oil well dates from 1859), just a few names compete for the best, while many more vie for the worst.

Two Best: Trump and Reagan

The best two from a classical liberal perspective are Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan. A third candidate just does not come to mind, certainly in the modern energy era.…

“Donald Trump has been to climate regulation as General Sherman was to Atlanta,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School, referring to the Union general who razed the city during the Civil War. “Hopefully it won’t take as long to rebuild.”

“We’ve lost very important time on climate change, which we can ill afford,” said Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan energy and environment-focused research organization in Washington. “There is severe damage. To ignore climate for four years, you can’t put a price on that. It’s a huge issue that needs to be confronted with long-term momentum and extreme dedication, and we have lost that.”

Quoted in Coral Davenport, “What Will Trump’s Most Profound Legacy Be?

“And, frankly, libertarians like you who have supported Trump bear blame for this crap too. You have NO ground to stand on today having enabled this seditious shitty excuse for a human being….” (Steve Horwitz to Rob Bradley, Facebook, January 6, 2021)

“For me, one of the most tragic results of the Trump phenomenon has been to cause good, decent, reasonable classical liberals (libertarians, the good ones, not the zealots, you know what I mean) to yell at each other in anger and frustration.” (Peter Lewin, Facebook, January 8, 2021)

Amid the Capitol violence of Wednesday January 6, Peter Lewin, a notable Austrian-school economist and respected classical liberal, posted on Facebook about the “out of control zealots…. Mob Hysteria ready to explode….” Exchanges followed. I asked some rather civil questions including this one:

I’m not condoning the violence, just trying to put it in perspective…..

[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.

A decade ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…