“Thanks Rob Bradley for coming here to confirm Exxon’s (and by extension your) lies.” (Gunnar Schade, Texas A&M University)

“Enron was the bad firm; ExxonMobil under Lee Raymond was the good firm. Energy affordability matters! Happy to debate this with you at Texas A&M!” (Bradley, below)

On social media, Goran Janjic, self-described “Head of Sustainability | Business Strategist | Managing Director | Corporate and Government Affairs Leader,” shared a recent article (Tracing Big Oil’s PR War to Delay Action on Climate Change” Harvard Gazette) and stated:

ExxonMobil has misled the public about #climatechange by telling the public one thing and then saying and doing the opposite behind closed doors.

The latest work shows that while their tactics have evolved from outright, blatant climate denial to more subtle forms of #lobbying and propaganda, their end goal remains the same.

“Energy density is the silliest of all. Yours is ‘dense’ energy that we have to pay for, every day, forever, except that it eventually runs out, vs. energy that arrives for free, forever, and never runs out.” (Bryan, below)

“Perhaps wind and solar are not renewable energies because usable surface area is finite and the infrastructure otherwise wears out–or the technology is too expensive to even compete as a ‘nonrenewable.’ Solar is not ‘renewable’ for many hours of the day, right? Wind too.” (Bradley, below)

The term resourceship has been coined to understand why ‘depletable’ resources can an do expand over time. In fact, when it comes to oil, gas, and coal, such expansion has been for all time. Only nationalization, price controls, and other destructive government policies can reverse the natural progress of human ingenuity applied to minerals (as to non-minerals) in the real world.…

Ed. Note: This interview with Robert L. Bradley Jr. by Jane Shaw Stroup appeared earlier this week at the Liberty and Ecology website of the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research. Comments are welcomed, including new questions to clarify the role of nuclear power in a free economy.

Q1. What role should nuclear power have in the years ahead?

A. “Let the market decide” is the straightforward classical-liberal, free-market answer. This means government neutrality in terms of not subsidizing or penalizing one energy technology versus another to determine what, when, where.

The decision to build new capacity, or the decision to operate-versus-retire, should be based on stand-alone economics, without government favor or penalty.

Q2. Under this standard, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix as far as new capacity?…

“[My] early writing was from a viewpoint that there was an ocean of BTUs beneath our feet, and what was high cost and supplemental today would become low cost and conventional later. I ‘trusted’ human ingenuity. I turned out ‘right’ for the wrong technological reason: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”

Any intellectual is interested in what is written about him or her, whether it be in the newspaper or an essay, book, or doctoral dissertation. In my case, being of 66 summers, and having a lot of scholarship under my belt, I do not worry much about the momentary ad hominem stuff. But for the record, I am eager to correct with facts and interpretation as needed.

This brings me to a dissertation, “Limits and Cornucopianism: A History of Neo-Liberal Environmental Thought, 1920–2007” (New York University: 2019).…