Editor's Perspective

While signing a tentative agreement to moderate nuclear development hardly makes Iran a beacon of geopolitical goodwill, speculation is hard to resist.

The chairman of the US Senate Committee on Finance proposes generally righteous tax reform that would specifically hurt oil and gas producers and refiners.

The Canadian government is attacking assumptions driving a European plan to discourage the use of fuels made from bitumen.

An energy-cost squeeze might coax Europe back toward the supplier of natural gas from which it has been trying to turn away.

A furious controversy over stumbling health-care law provides useful context for assessment of an earlier meddling by the US government in economic behavior.

A political conservative leveraging shrill argumentation on a judgmental view of substance abusers would be censured for insensitivity.

Political forces are aligning in Canada toward a vital debottlenecking of the oil sands.

A country eager to develop renewable energy can accommodate ambition to economics without abandoning its environmental principles. Sometimes, suggests a study by IHS, moderation is enough.

One of many dangers in all-or-nothing politics is that brinksmanship with the national economy might start to feel routine. Repetition can have that effect.

With the US and Iran, warmth does not mean thaw.

If the electricity-generation business was destined to build few coal-fired units anyway, why does the US need a regulation ensuring that outcome?

Another time Congress resorted to bipartisanship to make energy law, the US recommitted itself to fuel selection by politics instead of markets and created problems now becoming crises.

Grasp two principles, says Lucian Pugliaresi, and “you will exceed the combined wisdom of Congress and the last four administrations.”

Policy in the US for LNG exports remains a work in progress.

With a ludicrous antitrust initiative, US senators from Iowa and Minnesota show why the federal Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) needs repeal instead of repair.

Obstructionism accommodates itself more readily to politics than to argument.

Oil is next in US President Barack Obama’s carbon offensive.

What applies to university education applies just as well to frantic energy regulation.