Michael Rodgers, director of U.S. Cyber Command, says it is only a matter of when we are going to see something dramatic in a cyber attack on the country’s critical infrastructure.

One big concern is that most of the pipelines are operated by private companies, which could limit the government’s visibility into their operations. McCreary, who is now chief of disruptive technology programs at Georgia Tech Research Institute, said “there’s a lot of value to being able to execute remote operations on digital systems, and there are tough choices to balancing private business costs and efficiencies versus national security dependencies on privately owned infrastructure.”

Pipeline operators take cybersecurity “very seriously” and keep operations communications separated from business and outside communications, said John Stoody, vice president of government and public relations for the Association of Oil Pipe Lines. He said the owners and operators of America’s liquid pipelines, which his group represents, participates in the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration’s security efforts.

“While we are unaware of any successful cyberattacks on U.S. liquids pipelines, we will remain vigilant against any such threats,” Stoody said in an e-mail.

Continued vigilance is warranted, given the view that what happened in Turkey will happen in the U.S. Last month, Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, told the House Intelligence Committee that “it is only a matter of the ‘when,’ not the ‘if,’ that we are going to see something dramatic” in a cyberattack on the country’s critical infrastructure.

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist, an “architect” of Obamacare, and the guy who stepped on so many land mines in his now famous videos, has an upcoming new role. Mr. Gruber is going to Capital Hill on Tuesday as a congressional witness to answer questions about all those things he said, like the “lack of transparency [about the law] is a huge political advantage” and why Gruber thinks voters are “stupid.”

Read here from Politico Magazine about the central issue in the latest Obamacare lawsuit to go before the Supreme Court. Gruber appears to be making the exact argument that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are making: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”

As one of the lead attorneys in the case notes, “Gruber is Exhibit A that any English-speaking person knows what the subsidies language says.”

What really infuriates the Obama administration and congressional Democrats at the moment, however, is what Gruber said about the central issue in the latest Obamacare lawsuit to go before the Supreme Court: whether the law actually allows subsidies for people who get their health insurance through the federal marketplace that covers 37 states, not just people who get it from state-based marketplaces. If the justices decide that it doesn’t—thanks to the way one section of the law is worded—it can gut most of the law.

Just about every staffer who worked on the legislation says, no, that’s not what we meant—of course the law allows subsidies for everyone. But that’s not what Gruber said. In yet another video, from January 2012, he appears to make the exact same argument that the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court lawsuit are making: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” Naturally, the quote from that video is right there in the petition to the Supreme Court—which calls Gruber “one of the Act’s architects”—and it’s a good bet that it will come up in the oral arguments. Michael Carvin, the lead attorney in the case, sums it up: “Gruber is Exhibit A that any English-speaking person knows what the subsidies language says.”

Pat Buchanan thinks so and writes that H.R.758 is full of falsehoods and steeped in superpower hypocrisy. As Pat notes, ex-Rep. Ron Paul says that House Resolution 758 is so “full of war propaganda that it rivals the rhetoric from the chilliest era of the Cold War.

Pat concludes, “Those who produced this provocative resolution do not belong in charge of U.S. foreign policy, nor of America’s nuclear arsenal.”

Members of Congress would do well by their constituents to read the Cato Institute’s Chris Preble’s The Power Problem for a better understanding of how Congress should conduct a foreign policy that would have as a goal making America more safe and more prosperous.

Over 50 years ago M. King Hubbert published his theory which has become known as the Hubbert Curve. Simply put, when you reach peak production of a finite resource, then half of the original reserves have been produced and the remaining half will be produced in a decline pattern that is a mirror image of the pre-peak production. He used coal, which was known to have peaked, as an example: and the Hubbert Curve fit almost perfectly, in a shape quite similar to a bell-shaped curve.

Then he applied the curve to oil.  He first predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1968. But, the North Slope was discovered that year. When Hubbert made a presentation in Boston that I attended in the mid-1970’s, his Curve hadn’t worked as planned. So he redefined the Curve to exclude Alaska!

Meanwhile, over my 47 year career as an oil-analyst/investment-adviser, it seems world oil production is always about to peak according to the Hubbert Curve. But in the mid-1970s along came the Norwegian North Sea, then the British North Sea, then a dramatic increase in Russian production, and then higher prices that made water-injection- steam injection and CO2 injection economic. Now we have fracturing. There is also the Venezuela wild card; they have the largest single share of world reserves (20%).

The problem is that oil is a unique resource because there is a big difference between “oil in place” and “recoverable reserves.” The latter is a function of price, which varies tremendously. The 10-year average crude oil price has been about $80 per barrel, about $60 over the past 20 years, and $35 over the past 40 years. It was well under $10 when I got into the business. When Obama took office, the price of crude was only $35/bbl and since then it’s been over $110 and now $65. During the same period, U.S. production is up over 50%! Hubbert never would have believed it.

The most significant year in oil price history was 1971 when the Texas Railroad Commission allowed producers to go to a 100% MER (maximum efficient rate) of possible production for the first time since it was given control of Texas production in 1919. At that very moment, the U.S. handed over control of world oil prices to OPEC. First, Saudi Arabia nationalized its oil industry in stages and raised their price from $3 a barrel to over $5, then to $11. Then, OPEC responded to our support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War by curtailing oil shipments to the U.S. on October 22, 1973. The rest is history.

Today there are three players that call the shots, because they produce far more oil than any other countries: The U.S. where production is increasing, Saudi Arabia where production is flat and Russia where production is declining. What today’s price volatility is all about is the Arabs trying to kick us out of the #1 spot by making high-cost production uneconomic. The Russians are playing along, too.

The Saudis can produce oil for $2/bbl. But, every OPEC country needs higher prices ($90-$110) to balance their country’s budget. So, they are playing a “game of chicken” that can’t go on forever. Unfortunately, supply and demand for oil are both very inelastic. The quantity/price elasticity is only about .10, meaning that demand goes down by only 1% with a 10% increase in price and supply goes up by only 1%, and vice versa. Yet, inventories (a leading short-term indicator of price) are now volatile from week to week.  Is world production peaking? It looks like it, but it looked like it many times before.  So, where will prices go while the game is going on….who knows?

The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell looks at Nazism, Communism, Socialism and the big-spending interventionist policies of Barack Obama.

Is Obama a socialist?

If you’re asking whether he’s a big-spending interventionist, the answer is yes.

But if you’re asking whether the President believes in government ownership of the means of production (which is the defining issue in the socialist economic platform), the answer is no (though the White House surely won’t like how Thomas Sowell describes Obama’s ideology).

But I generally don’t care about these word fights. Big government is bad because it hurts people and relies on coercion, and that’s true whether we’re talking about socialism, communism, Nazism, corporatism, or other forms of statism.

But I do care for historical accuracy and honesty.

Writing for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Dan Hannan of the European Parliamentexplains that the German National Socialists of the Hitler era were….well, socialists.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk. So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring.

How would you like to flick on your wall switch, only to find out you have no juice? The good news? Thanks to Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the nationwide cost for electricity could rise a staggering 12% to 17% over 15 years. The bad news? Thanks to Obama’s Clean Power Plan, you might not be able to get power when you need it most.

A nonprofit, nonpartisan body of experts in the engineering and operation of power grids warns of the risk of long-term reliability of some areas of the U.S. grid. Because of rapid shifts to renewable and natural–gas generation, along with forced EPA regulatory closures of coal-fueled power plants, the Midwest, New York and Texas already have dangerously low levels of “reserve margins.” Read more here from Kevin Cramer, a U.S. congressman from North Dakota, on why we should be afraid of the EPA as well as the dark.

Rep. Cramer writes:

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), a regulatory authority that monitors the U.S. and Canadian power systems, released a study on Nov. 12 concluding that the long-term reliability of the U.S. grid in some areas is already at risk. Because of rapid shifts to renewable and natural-gas generation, combined with closures of coal-fueled power plants due to existing Environmental Protection Agency regulations, “reserve margins” in the Midwest, New York and Texas have reached dangerously low levels—meaning an increased likelihood of brownouts and blackouts in the coldest weeks of winter and the hottest days of summer.

This analysis of the grid’s long-term reliability left out the potential impact of the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which would force even more coal-fueled power plants to close. A separate NERC report, released one week earlier on Nov. 5, pointed out that the plan’s compliance deadlines for reducing carbon emissions were not realistic when considering how long it takes to build new gas pipelines and electricity transmission lines necessary for new and existing renewable and natural-gas plants to serve customers previously served by coal plants.

More precisely, NERC pointed out that the EPA’s estimates for continuous 1.5% energy efficiency gains each year are unsubstantiated, specifically stating, “this sustainability is not supported by any peer-reviewed or technical studies of energy efficiency potential.” This creates an incentive to close even more coal-fueled power plants to meet carbon-dioxide reduction requirements not actually attained by energy efficiency, posing even greater risks to the availability of electricity throughout the U.S.

These warnings are worth paying attention to. NERC is not a special-interest group. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan body of experts in the engineering and operation of power grids. They are the architects of the miracle we take for granted every time we flip a switch and electricity instantaneously appears from generating sources hundreds of miles away.

EPA personnel are environmental regulators, not electrical engineers, and have no experience in or knowledge of the construction and operation of power grids. But it is inexcusable that the agency failed to heed the advice of those who do have such expertise. The administration’s Clean Power Plan will remake an enormous sector of the U.S. economy, affecting almost every industry and every consumer. It is irresponsible in the extreme that this plan has been put forth without due consideration of the risk it poses to the reliability of the nation’s electricity supply.