Cato hosted a policy forum last week (which you can watch in its entirety if you missed it the first time around) to discuss a new paper released by Security America’s Energy Future (SAFE). The paper – written by long-time friends Andy Morriss and Roger Meiners – argues that there is a consensus among academics who have studied OPEC. The consensus? The cartel is responsible for less crude oil on the market than would otherwise be the case (which means higher prices than would otherwise be the case) and for the bulk of the price volatility we find in crude oil and, thus, gasoline markets. “The international market for oil is not a free market” they conclude. “The global oil market deviates in important ways from the competitive model and that these market anomalies have significant economic impacts and so are relevant for policy makers.”
While Morriss and Meiners would thus seem to invite politicians to act, they offered no agenda of their own. That’s where SAFE comes in. FedEx’s Fred Smith, who co-chairs SAFE’s Energy Security Leadership Council, argued at the forum that the federal government needs to respond to OPEC’s machinations by (1) achieving energy independence for North America (a goal I’ve been quite skeptical about in the past), (2) establishing tough energy efficiency standards for a whole host of goods, but most particularly, for U.S. automobiles via CAFÉ standards (an agenda that most economists would reject in favor of accurate price signals), and (3) subsidizing R&D in order to find alternatives to oil in transportation markets. SAFE discusses this agenda more robustly in their “National Energy Strategy for Energy Security, 2013”.
SMU’s James Smith – one of the most prominent energy economists who works in this field – was on-hand to offer what I think was a compelling rebuttal to the central arguments forwarded by the Morriss and Meiners study.