Full Title: Predatory Foreign Investment and Domestic Energy Security
Author(s): Ariel Cohen and John Roberts
Publisher(s): R Street
Publication Date: March 1, 2016
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
U.S. energy markets started 2016 with good news. The 40-year-old oil-export ban, which long has hamstrung one of the world’s leading oil-and-gas producers, is now defunct. As of New Year’s Day, the first tankers of American crude oil left for Europe.
A relic of a bygone era, the ban initially was a response to the economic trauma of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, during which oil prices nearly quadrupled over the course of just six months. The embargo caused a dramatic global economic and security crisis and prompted many of the whiplash measures that were embedded in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975.2 It did not help that energy policy at-large, and oil policy in particular, were at the time still in thrall to a protectionist mindset that sought to preserve domestic resources and weaken the influence of foreign trade.