The Plenary

I covered Energy Secretary Steven Chu's comments in the previous post. Here, I will cover the rest of Day 1. This is not so much a comprehensive summary as it is a collection of observations and things I otherwise found to be interesting. My notes at times are spotty, so if someone was there and feels like this essay contains an error, please let me know.

Following Chu's talk, Professor William Nordhaus of Yale gave a talk entitled Energy and the Macroeconomy. I got called out during his talk, so I missed most of it. What I do remember him arguing is that oil embargoes are completely worthless, because oil is fungible. If Venezuela decided not to sell their oil to the U.S., they would end up selling it to someone else, which would displace some other seller, which at some point would end up with someone else selling it to the U.S. I missed the next point, but Gail the Actuary was there and said "a corollary of this is that there is no point in protecting the US oil and gas industry. We can just buy what we need elsewhere."