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.…

Act I finds the protagonist boldly proclaiming an original and bold explication of the economics and history of the gas and electric industries. In Act II, we use the weapons developed by our protagonist to render much that passes for sound energy policy both tragic and comedic.

In Act III, we search deeply within ourselves to discern if the protagonist provides answers to the modern vexations that ail us. Come let us listen to Friedman Milton as he disarms the protagonist.

Black and White–or Gray?

The Bradley Project seems to dichotomize the world into free market capitalism and political capitalism. To paraphrase George Orwell, free markets good; political markets bad.

I have no quarrel with Bradley’s conclusion that both energy generally and natural gas and electricity in particular have been victims of political capitalism in all its hoary forms.…

“Edison to Enron … [is] the second part of a three-volume series on the history of American energy, told through the distinction between productive and predatory capitalism.  Bradley is a very much underrated economic historian, largely because of his ‘amateur’ [nonacadmic] status, but there is a remarkable amount of learning in his books.”

– Tyler Cowen, ‘What I’ve Been Reading,’ Marginal Revolution, November 15, 2011.

Last Friday afternoon in our nation’s capital, Robert L. Bradley, Jr., a prominent figure in the esoterica of energy markets, unveiled the Project on which he has labored for a decade before a full room at the American Enterprise Institute. Kenneth Green moderated, and comments were provided by Stephen Hayward and yours truly. My formal remarks follow.

The Project

Enter stage right, our protagonist with The Bradley Project.…

“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.”