About Me

I am a consultant specializing in evaluating energy efficiency and demand response programs offered by electric and gas utilities and state energy efficiency organizations.

I plan to blog on energy issues, economics, and the intersection of evolution, religion, biology, and economics. I’m fascinated by how we humans got to be where we are and why. I like thinking about how evolution and biology help us understand what makes us uniquely humans and why we behave as we do today. I am also fascinated by how people relate to and react to their political institutions and how that has evolved over time.

I expect to use my blog as a way to develop and expand ideas, which means I look forward to comments and probably means that I will edit posts periodically to improve and expand them. That may be a bit contrary to the general linear approach I see with other blogs. This also means that my initial posts may be half-formed thoughts but will hopefully improve with time. Please consider offering your thoughts to help me move them forward!

I will use this blog to explore the foundations for my beliefs and values. This will surely be an evolving list but here is a start:

  1. I have great faith in people’s ability to make wise choices when supported by a healthy society (which includes family, social circles, their church, and the government).
  2. I have great admiration for people I meet in all walks of life who deeply desire to try to make the world a better place. They sincerely care about others and do their best to act on that care.
  3. I believe that much harm is done in the world when people think that forced collective action is the best approach to solving problems. We see this most clearly in dictatorships but we also see this when well-meaning people think that their democratically elected government is best positioned to solve some problem by direct action.
  4. I believe that the best strategy for advancing the human condition in concert with a healthy environment is to work toward liberty. Freeing people from shackles of rules, regulations, restrictions and well-meaning paternalism will enable our inherent goodness, creativity, intelligence, and drive to bring about improvements in all walks of life.

I approached writing a blog with some trepidation for I expected to write some posts that would not find favor with some of my friends, co-workers, and those I encounter in daily life. But I decided to risk it. Some time after starting this blog I read the following in Hayek’s introduction to his book The Road to Serfdom. It states nicely a similar concern.

For those who, in the current fashion, seek interested motives in every profession of a political opinion, I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that I have every possible reason for not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms; it has forced me to put aside work for which I feel better qualified and to which I attach greater importance in the long run. … If in spite of this I have come to regard the writing of this book as a duty which I must not evade, this was mainly due to a peculiar and serious feature of the discussions of problems of future economic policy at the present time, of which the public is scarcely sufficiently aware.