Edward Lucas is called a ‘Senior Vice President at the Center for European Policy Analysis’, and Senior Editor of The Economist. I am an academic energy economist, and perhaps the leading academic energy economist in the world. I also enjoy making the claim that I am  a brilliant lecturer.

During the 5 or 6 years I taught international financial economics at Uppsala University, I made it quite clear that the The Economist was not to be discussed or even enthusiastically mentioned in my presence. When, at the parties to  which  my students invited me , if I were asked about that policy, I said  that I regarded The Economist as a “compendium of London wine bar gossip”, and not only were students never to mention it to me, but if some of the Japanese ‘Thought Police’ who were often referred to in the Chicago of my youth were still alive and were ‘free-lancing’, I would try to get them invited to those wonderful gatherings in order to scrutinize the brain waves of my students in case some of those young ladies and gentlemen possessed a sensual fascination for The Economist.

In an op-ed piece in Svenska Dagbladet (Dec.4), Mr Lucas claimed that Russia is exporting “corruption and influence” along with its natural gas. If he visited Sweden I would ask him to explain this interest of his in a complicated subject like natural gas, and regardless of his reply, I would profess to be honored if he and/or one or more of his colleagues would visit my classroom to present a lesson on that or similar subjects to me and my students.

What I would NOT tell him however is that anyone appearing in my classroom to give me a lesson on any energy topic would be made to  feel so inferior that they would never want to hear words like ‘natural gas’ again.

Apparently Lucas was able to gain access to the op-ed page of a Swedish newspaper because of the alarm that many readers feel about what has happened on the Eastern border of the Ukraine, and the appearance of some Russian aircraft close to Swedish air space. Frankly, I also cannot understand those events, they strike me as irrational, and because of them I wonder if Mr Putin is not imbibing too heavily in some of the liquids that certain foreign visitors of my acquaintance were invited to sample at Russian breakfast tables.

But you see, I know some things that Mr Lucas and his associates do not know. When the North Korean army invaded South Korea, if the U.S. government and/or military had been thinking clearly and not dealing in fantasies like those supported by Mr Lucas and his Economist foot soldiers, they would have immediately sent every tank and combat aircraft in the U.S. to Korea. Instead this equipment and some other assets were kept in the U.S. (and Europe) to fight a war that was NEVER going to take place, given the huge superiority at that time of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

I lost some of my best friends in that war, and so you see I am supremely unimpressed by the ignorant beliefs that Lucas & Co have about a country (Russia) that I claim will one day be the richest in Europe, and maybe in the world.

Now for this ‘seizing’ business. I encountered it in a recent edition of the Economist (2015) that was on a shelf in the library of the Economics building at Uppsala University, and of course the word energy forced me to open that publication. How is this for nonsense: “A carbon tax is a much better way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases than subsidies for windmills and nuclear plants.” Or for that matter the talk about “exploiting the oil and gas in the shale beneath the feet of Europeans”, and as icing on a smelly cake the ban on energy exports by the U.S. is termed a “boondoggle” for American refiners and petrochemical firms.

The only thing better than subsidies for nuclear plants is governments and private enterprises working together to develop and utilize the nuclear technologies that will become available during this or the next decade, and doing so immediately. As for the shale beneath the feet of Europeans, the CEO of none other than Exxon Mobil (XOM) pointed out that shale clays in Europe do not make the cut, although this might change in the future.

What will not change is the exceptional  natural depletion of shale deposits, which is a condition that OPEC clearly understands, and probably underlies their new-found fondness for ‘market pricing’, nor the stupidity of Americans putting (or thinking about putting) their precious energy resources on the block. Yes, better a boondoggle for American firms – especially petrochemical producers and their suppliers –  than supplying foreigners with the energy means to compete more successfully with Americans.

References

Banks, Ferdinand E. (2015). ‘Energy and Economics theory’. Singapore, London and New York: World Scientific.(2015).

Energy Economics: A Modern First Course. (In Process) The Economist (2015). Seize The Day. (January 17)