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Energy politics follows laws like those of physics

Oil & Gas Journal

Like energy, politics has useful and useless states. Also like energy, politics seems drawn by some natural law in the direction of uselessness.

Observation makes clear that as rhetorical heat rises in a political system addressing energy, disorder overwhelms discussion, degrading the consequent ideas.

Evidence of this political version of entropy abounds. It includes proposals to outlaw "price-gouging," to rein in the supposed excesses of "speculators," and to tax hydrocarbons in order to fund energy of lesser utility.

Energy politics has its peculiarities.

In physics and engineering, attention to energy is constant.

In politics, attention to energy—rhetorical heat—varies as a function of the price of vehicle fuel.

And since the quality of political ideas for energy varies as an inverse function of rhetorical heat, it follows that the risk of policy error rises with prices of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Price levels exist, however, below which political attention and therefore rhetorical heat seem to vanish.