Optimism Despite the March of the Economists

There seems to be a sense again that all that's to be invented has been invented. That's lunacy.  Not in recent memory have economists been so popular, nor were more in the steady march of dispensing wisdom nightly on TV, in columns, installed as federal potentates, czars of financial recovery and as pundits, prognosticators and…

Will Exxon Get Googled?

AMERICAN SPECTATOR The image of the oil industry is captured (admittedly, delicously) by Bruce Willis play the rough-and-ready character of an oil roughneck in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon – driving golf balls off an oil platform aimed at a Greenpeace ship. Dirty, tough, old-world, almost Jurassic.  Oil, in short, is seen as old tech. So yesterday.

Giant Leaps and Small Steps for Energy Technology

President Kennedy's 1961 speech launched the Apollo Program. Imagine if he had invoked the spirit of the Roaring '20s and the technology of the first radio broadcasts. That's the time span that separates today from the Apollo and, even longer, from the Manhattan projects that were embraced as archetypes for 21st century energy policy. While…