"Ten Principles of Energy Policy"
Excerpts from the introduction to Joseph Bast's "Ten Principles of Energy Policy"...
It covers 10 of the most important energy issues facing the country, with each section ending with recommended actions and suggested readings. A thorough bibliography appears at the end of the booklet....
Three themes appear frequently in this guide:
- Energy issues are often environmental issues, and vice versa. Restrictions on access to energy are often defended in the name of environmental protection.
- Newspaper stories and advocacy spin are often at odds with sound science and facts.
- Markets usually do a better job than governments at giving consumers what they want and directing capital and other scarce resources to their best and most efficient uses....
The second theme, sound science, is in response to the fact that debates over energy policy often are driven by exaggeration and scare tactics used by advocates to boost public support for their agendas. Environmental groups embrace these tactics as a way to generate public sympathy for their cause, while business groups embrace them to secure subsidies for themselves or regulations that harm their competitors....
How do we balance energy and environmental concerns with the individual rights and freedoms we hold dear?...
Unhindered and unsubsidized competition among energy technologies is the best means to discovering tomorrow’s new energy sources. Elected officials should refuse to try to pick winners, even though doing so may score points with one group or another in the short term.
The 10 topics....1. Energy independence is an illusion
2. Gasoline prices are market-driven
3. Global warming is not a crisis
4. Air pollution is not a major public health problem
5. Mercury is not a major public health problem
6. Biofuels should not be subsidized
7. CAFE standards sacrifice lives for oil
8. Electric deregulation is still necessary
9. Liquefied natural gas is part of the solution
10. Nuclear energy is part of the solution
The full PDF version is available here...
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 5:45 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
A less charitable read of this pamphlet is "what's good for the energy industry is good for America."
By the way, what have you read on the other side of the global warming issue?
Not exactly. They criticize a range of subsidies that recipients within the energy would presumably enjoy. People often confuse pro-"market"/society and pro-business.
Aside from govt subsidies and the need for govt reg of externalities, what's good for the energy industry is largely good for America, right?
As for GW reading: aside from its ubiquity in the media, no-- nothing academic. With something that's over my head, I often stick to contrarian stuff. Anything you'd recommend?
Actually, I'm not sure what to recommend for you to read.
I have the book and movie by Al Gore, but while these are entertaining, I'm not sure how accurate they are, and I doubt you would find them convincing.
I have the Tim Flannery book The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth (2005). Flannery is a scientist, an Australian ecologist, who changed specialties to global warming. The book is interesting. If he is correct, we are in very deep trouble. He tells some disturbing stories. The one that impressed me the most is the story of something called bromofluorocarbons (BFCs), which are very similar to the CFCs whose use was curtailed to protect the ozone layer. It turns out that BFCs can be used for the same applications as CFCs, but industry used CFCs because they're cheaper. This is very fortunate, because if BFCs were used instead, it would have rapidly destroyed the ozone layer, which would have caused world agriculture to crash. We would have had little warning.
And I have Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert (2006). She is a journalist who writes for the New Yorker magazine. This book is well-written, short and seems credible. She describes scientists who are more alarmed than the media who report their work (contrary to the usual tendency of the media to hype things or be more alarmist than the scientists).
I would go with the Kolbert book before the Flannery book, but they're both worth reading. But it's possible there's a better book on the subject that I haven't read.
I just blogged on Lomberg-- who believes in global warming, but sees far more important, lower-cost problems with which we should deal. Has anyone read his work?
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