“[I]t is both pleasing and strange to see Joe Romm don a free market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer hat when it comes to nuclear. His (post-modernistic) dream is that wind power, solar power, and negawatts can usher in a post-fossil-fuel era. In reality, however, fossil fuels will replace nuclear to a large degree.”

“Perry Just Made Taxpayers Invest in a $25-billion Nuclear ‘Financial Quagmire.’” So read the headline of a recent post by Joe Romm (Center for American Progress). His subtitle: “Nuclear plants are money losers, but Perry is loaning billions more to the last new one being built.”

It is strange. Nuclear is the only scalable CO2-free electrical generation source known to man. Although it is the most expensive way to boil water (and hopelessly uneconomic compared to natural gas- and even coal-fired power), a stubborn, quasi-religious segment of the Climate Malthusians refuses to bulge.…

“If it were only so simple to pass a law and increase income and wealth. ‘One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than by their results,’ as the late free -market economist/educator Milton Friedman once said.”

The Houston Chronicle, as yesterday’s post documented, has gone from bad to worse in the hydrocarbon capital of the United States and world. The New York Times of Houston (the proper name for our supposedly hometown paper) seems to be at war with not only Donald Trump but also skeptics of climate alarmism and the free market more generally.

Along with climate-alarmist unsigned editorials, guest editorials, (selected) letters-to-the-editor, and cartoons, the Chronicle is all-in with Progressive notions. Consider the lead editorial on Labor Day, September 4, 2017.…

“Forced use of higher-cost U.S.-flag vessels has benefitted domestic water carrier firms, shipbuilding companies, and associated labor at the expense of consumers. This advantage, however, has been diluted because inflated shipping costs has reduced the attractiveness of barge and tanker transport compared to other alternatives.”

The Puerto Rico recovery effort has brought attention to an arcane special-interest cabotage regulation that delayed shipments to the imperiled island–and required a waiver from President Trump: Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, [(Public Law 261, 41 Stat. 988 (1920)], commonly known as the Jones Act.

Previous posts at MasterResource (here and here) examined the history of oil-export regulation by the federal government; this post surveys the history of water-vessel restrictions from Washington, D.C. directly or indirectly impacting oceanic commerce.…

“When environmental groups bear the costs of managing their own lands, their behavior is often very different from what they advocate on public lands.”

“As Richard Stroup of PERC once put it: ‘Audubon is smart to maintain wildlife habitat while capitalizing on revenue potential—now if only our federal land management agencies could figure this out.'”

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would seek to open oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The plan, outlined in Trump’s 2018 budget resolution, has reignited a long-standing debate over the oil-rich Alaskan wildlife refuge.

“Some places are so special that they should simply be off-limits,” Nicole Whittington-Evans of the Wilderness Society said at the time, arguing that the refuge is “too wild to drill” and “has values far beyond whatever oil might lie beneath it.”…