The Wall Street Journal is the nation’s most widely read and respected newspaper. It is the ‘newspaper of record’ (not the New York Times) in regard to business and has long been sound on economic public policy matters.

I reproduce two letters I have had published in the WSJ: one recent, one five years old. I believe that time will not significantly diminish either my past or present opinions because they are grounded in energy and climate reality, not hyperbole.

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“Doubts on Climate Are Reasonable” (May 5, 2010)

Kerry Emanuel’s letter of April 28 illustrates some of the major points of Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial” (April 22). It is bad enough that Mr. Emanuel refers to major misrepresentations, errors and unethical behavior among scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as “minor errors.”…

Julian Simon’s The Economics of Population Growth (1977) was hailed as a “path-breaking work” that offered “a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense” (Joseph Spengler, quoted in Simon, 2002: 256).

The overused term “paradigm” must be applied with caution, however, because few new ideas really create paradigms, and paradigms can be wrong. Also, contra Kuhn, there are examples of science cumulatively approaching the truth short of revolution (Weinberg). Still, Simon put together the parts of an alternative worldview that continues to penetrate its way into the scientific orthodoxy, particularly in economics (Bradley, 2000: 19–20).

Simon’s extraordinary science (in Kuhnian terms) reached two major conclusions:

(1) a growing population can improve virtually all environmental welfare indicators; and

(2) scarcity measures of mineral (“depletable”) resources are not qualitatively different from that of other economic goods.…

“Compared to Ford and Carter, the SPR experienced a ‘Reagan Revo­lution’ – although hardly of the free-market variety. Two reasons explained Reagan’s bullish SPR [buy and fill] policy. First, the reserve was the centerpiece of Reagan’s ‘free market’ energy policy, which precluded the need for stand­by price and allocation controls to deal with future emergencies. Second, the reserve was an instrument of foreign policy should U.S. intervention and confrontation lead to re­prisals by oil-exporting countries as it had in 1973 and 1979.”

“With the Reagan acceleration at a time of record crude prices, the reserve program became a major cost item, and with budget deficit problems, a group of pro­posals came forth to reduce cost while maintaining fill rates. Global settlements with refiners accused of product price overcharges was one tapped source.”…

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is in play. The 695 million barrel inventory, stored in four storage locations in Texas and Louisiana with a capacity of 713.5 million barrels, never found its purpose; it is still waiting for the third oil crisis (after the 1973/74 Arab Embargo and the 1979 Iranian Revolution). Not surprisingly, the SPR is on the verge of becoming a piggy-bank offset for lawmakers. At $50 per barrel, SPR inventory is worth about $35 billion.

This week, MasterResource reviews the history of state and federal oil (and natural gas) storage regulation and ownership. Part I today is early (pre-SPR) regulation. Part II tomorrow will review the prehistory and beginnings of the SPR.

Part III will examine early problems with the federal storage program; Part IV early fill and financing controversies.…