Contradictions of energy policy emerge so spontaneously these days in the US that it’s rare to have the chance to warn of one before it has fully developed and begun gorging itself on the national welfare.Examples abound:Officials assert energy independence as a guiding principle of energy policy yet withdraw federal land from oil and gas exploration and propose special taxation of the dominant, domestically produced energy forms.Lawmakers and regulators claim to want to lower the carbon intensity of energy use yet threaten to impose redundant and inevitably obstructionist federal regulation on hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has unlocked vast potential of the hydrocarbon li...