energy Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

Here’s a movie idea: A big greedy business resorts to fraud, dishonesty, and shysterism in order to line its pockets. Original, right? Well, except for:

• Erin Brockovich
• Wall Street
• Wall-E
• Aliens
• The Insider
• It’s A Wonderful Life
• The Lorax
• RoboCop
• Batteries Not Included
• Gremlins II
• Other People’s Money
• Boiler Room

You get the idea. A story about greedy businessmen steamrolling over the little guy is probably the least original movie premise you can think of.

Which leads me to this column by Holman Jenkins. Jenkins comments on the new movie Promised Land staring Matt Damon—a movie that targets fracking, a technology that has already created oodles of jobs and provided Americans with a gusher of affordable energy. In Jenkins’s words, Promised Land is “a typically stupid Hollywood thriller plot . . . that doubles down on the conventional ‘evil oil company’ stereotype.”

Jenkins goes on to highlight a different angle on the fracking issue that he thinks would make for an interesting movie: not one about the struggle between “Big Oil” and environmentalists but between neighbors who welcome the energy industry into their neighborhood and those who who don’t. This, Jenkins adds, is the original source of the opposition to fracking.

Yard signs abounded. Longtime acquaintances bellowed at each other in town-hall meetings. Groups professionally hostile to energy development only arrived later, having had the wit to notice that the more affluent, country-home owning opponents of local fracking were the environmental groups’ natural constituents.

Thus was born a political war, complete with standard “Big Oil” versus “Greenies” symbology, out of what had been a neighbor versus neighbor dispute. Yet, truth be told, neighbor versus neighbor is still the only story that’s interesting.

The only story that’s interesting? Are you kidding? What about a movie that showed the daring, ingenuity, and creativity of those spearheading America’s energy revolution? More generally why are there virtually no movies that show the exciting world of business?

It can’t be because these stories are boring. Look up the history of the oil industry. It’s no less dramatic than any episode of Breaking Bad.

It can’t be for lack of a market, either. One of the bestselling books of 2011 was the biography of Steve Jobs, which focuses mainly on his business achievements.

Why do we never see the exciting world of business? I have to think it’s because Hollywood is unwilling to show businessmen in a good light.

Tune in live today at 7 PM ET (4 PM PT) to watch leading environmentalist Bill McKibben debate Center for Industrial Progress founder (and former ARI fellow) Alex Epstein. As for me, I’ll be watching the debate live from Duke University.

Update: Here’s the video of the debate, in case you missed it.

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.

• Barack Obama is not a socialist.
• From the “exploiting others isn’t selfish” file: It turns out that robbing banks won’t make you rich. A report by a group economists concludes, “The return on an average bank robbery is, frankly, rubbish.”
• David Brooks has an interesting take on why today’s Republicans are (allegedly) so radical: “[M]any Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes.” There is something to this, I think. But the more plausible explanation is: Republicans have always moved to the right, at least rhetorically, when out of power. The real question is, how will they behave in power? That remains to be seen.
• Speaking of today’s “radical” Republicans, here is a perceptive paragraph from far-left rag The Nation. Referring to a statement from Justice Scalia in which he questions whether there should be a societal commitment to provide health care for those who can’t pay for it, the author writes: “[T]his bizarre display of indifference from a Supreme Court Justice breaks new ground in an evolving culture that seems to prize resistance to any and all government over the compassion that is the essence of civilized society. The Right screams often and loudly that President Obama has declared war on the Judeo-Christian underpinnings they hold as American as apple pie. But in fact, it is Justice Scalia, from his exalted perch, who appears intent on vacating the Golden Rule and undermining the Parable of the Good Samaritan, both core to Christian theology.” Of course, there is nothing compassionate about forcing people to pay for other people’s health care. But it is true that getting the government out of medicine means challenging Christian ideals, whether the right faces up to it or not.
• The suicidal war on coal.
• Okay, so Obamacare is no good. But the status quo is a disaster. Here are some good suggestions for how we can actually fix our health care problems.
• “In the 1990s Bill Clinton boasted that welfare reform took Americans off the dole. The Obama Administration boasts about how many it has added.”