Green Industrial Policy’s Unfinished Business - A Publicly Managed Fossil Fuel

With some notable exceptions, the policies that have built and sustained the US fossil fuel industry have left key decisions over the production, distribution, and pricing of the United States’ most important commodities in the hands of the private sector. [...] Unlike the financial sector, however, the core business model of the fossil fuel sector is a threat to the habitability of the planet. [...] “That future might be left to the simple working of the law of supply and demand but for the patent fact that the oil industry’s welfare is so intimately linked with the industrial prosperity and safety of the whole people, that Government and business can well join forces to work out this problem of practical conservation” (US Federal Oil Conservation Board 1926). [...] Nixon likened “Project Independence” to US efforts to build the atomic bomb and land on the moon: “Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources,” he said from the Oval Office (1973). [...] For example, from 1976 through 1992, the Eastern Shales Gas Project—initiated by the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was a precursor to the Department of Energy (DOE)—collaborated with drilling companies, universities, and government research institutions to scope out the availability of shale gas in the Appalachian, Michigan, and Illinois Basins and investigate how best to e.