Robert L. Bradley, Jr.

Robert L. Bradley, Jr. (born June 17, 1955) is CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research, and the author of several books on energy economics. He is also an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and a visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.

Biography

Bradley grew up in Houston, Texas. He graduated from The Kinkaid School in 1973. He received a B.A. in economics from Rollins College, where he was awarded the S. Truman Olin award for the top student in economics. He attended Rollins on a full athletic scholarship and was captain and MVP of the men's tennis team in 1977. He went on to receive an M.A. in economics from the University of Houston and a Ph.D. in political economy from International College, Los Angeles, where the Chair of his dissertation committee was Murray Rothbard. He then spent the summer of 1977 in residence at the Institute for Humane Studies in Menlo Park, California, studying with Austrian-school economists, including Rothbard and Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek.

Career

Bradley spent nearly 20 years in the business world, including 16 years at Enron, where for the last seven years he was corporate director for public policy analysis and speechwriter for Kenneth L. Lay. His opposition to the company's so-called "green" energy policy is recounted on his web site PoliticalCapitalism.org.

He has been a senior research fellow at the University of Houston and at the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award in 2002 for his work on free market approaches to energy sustainability.

He is the author of seven books on energy history and policy, including The Mirage of Oil Protection (1989);Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (2 vols.: 1996), which has been called "a landmark in regulatory studies"; Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (2000); Climate Alarmism Reconsidered (2003); and (with Richard Fulmer) Energy: The Master Resource (2004), which Milton Friedman described as a "splendid" book that "effectively debunks the widespread predictions of energy doom."

Bradley has edited two autobiographies: Done In Oil by J. Howard Marshall II (Texas A&M University Press, 1994) and Everyone Wins! A Life in Free Enterprise by Gordon Cain (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1997).

Bradley wrote Political Capitalism: A Trilogy, a business history and business best-practices book which documents the rise and fall of Enron. His first book, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), was followed by Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies (2011). Book 3, Political Enron: A Business History, will be published in two parts: Part I (The Rise) in 2016 and Part II (Fall and Aftermath) in 2018.

In late 2008, Bradley founded the free-market energy and climate blog MasterResource, which surpassed one million views in September 2011 and is trending to reach two million views in April 2014. As of January 2014, it was ranked a top twenty-five 'green blog' by Technorati.

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN