Transnational elites and American politicos want society to rearrange the energy market. For ‘society’ read ‘government.’
Amy Myers Jaffe’s “journey thinking about energy as a problem” began in 1973, waiting in those infamous gasoline lines. She hasn’t been alone in that journey. OPEC’s oil embargo was a defining event that has haunted the thinking of policy makers for decades. It inspired hundreds of books on energy policy. Some now argue that we inhabit an entirely different world from that of OPEC’s heyday. That is Ms. Jaffe’s theme in “Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security.” She wants our policies to shift accordingly.
First, Ms. Jaffe notes, our central concern these days is no longer energy shortages or import dependencies. We’ve gone “from scarcity to abundance.” The new worry is about having too much oil and too much of it burned: ditto for natural gas, oil’s hydrocarbon cousin. That reversal is, of course, driven by worries about climate change and the fact that hydrocarbons still fuel 80% of the world economy. Ms. Jaffe, a research professor at Tufts, joins many others calling for an “energy transition” to a supposedly inevitable lower-carbon future.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
Photo by Scharfsinn86/iStock
