Ed note: The extract below from a Joint Economic Committee Staff Report briefly describes the end of oil price and allocation regulation in 1981, righting one of the worst energy fiascos in U.S. history. This experience has taken price controls off the political table ever since with petroleum, including today with the Iran War. [“President Reagan’s Economic Legacy,” Section C: Energy Shortages and Regulatory Failures]

In the 1970s, OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was temporarily successful in driving up energy prices and hitting consumer wallets worldwide. OPEC’s manipulations of oil supplies were turned into a full-scale energy crisis in the United States because of price controls in energy markets.

Rising oil prices hurt consumers, but long lines at gas stations and shortages of heating oil were the work of bad policy, not of markets.…

“Many [green] philanthropists who are willing to step up are looking around and saying, ‘DOE is stepping back and Catalyst doesn’t exist. I can’t solve this on my own.’” – Lara Pierpoint, Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition (below)

For decades, energy realists have explained why the stock energy created by the sun — fossil fuels — are inherently more economical than the dilute, intermittent flow from the sun. The concept of energy density has been explained ceaselessly in articles and books by Vaclav Smil. Political Economy 101 — markets pick winners, leaving losers for government — also comes into play as experimental technologies enabled by special government favor face the political winds of change.

Evidence? Start with the recent demise of the rooftop solar industry and the EV industry here in the U.S.…

“The global climate elite are scrambling for relevancy and power. The poll-conscious wind and solar lobbies are disingenuously pitching affordability. And the climate zealots are getting nutty. Energy reality bats last.”

Let history note that the United States has issued a notice to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), effective February 27, 2026. This withdrawal is broader than the previously announced (and started) withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. The UNFCCC is the governing global network behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “consensus” science (based on subjective climate-model interpretation), as well as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Accord of 2015.

The one-year window is running, with formal withdrawal set for February 27, 2027. As summarized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):

In January, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the UNFCCC.

“Nuclear fission is the most complicated, fraught, expensive way to boil water to produce steam to drive electrical turbines.”

What U.S. industry is at once the most subsidized and regulated by the federal government? The answer is commercial nuclear power. As a result, the 73-year-old “Atoms for Peace” program represents the most expensive failure (malinvestment) in US business. potholed with uncompleted projects and massive cost overruns with completed projects. Future decommissioning costs will add to this liability.

But hyperbole rules with this technology, and there is always tomorrow. Forget that competitive viability did not emerge in the 1950s or 1960s, and George W. Bush and Joe Biden both failed at their attempted “nuclear renaissance.” Expect the same to result from today’s interventionist energy policy.

A future post will outline the crash attempt by President Trump and DOE secretary Chris Wright to get new nuclear capacity on track.…