The Rule of Capture: Government and the Oil Industry

The Oil Follies of 1970-1980 by Robert Sherrill, is a broad account of an important decade for energy law and politics. In a capsule review of the book, I noted that it is a journalistic, rather than an academic, look at the theory of capture as a way of talking about government regulation. Because Sherrill was writing for a predominantly lay audience, he did not undertake a systematic and rigorous analysis of the legal regulations concerning the petroleum industry. Nevertheless, his book does provoke a serious question: Is Big Oil bad, and if so, how should government regulate it? This essay is about the relationship between the government and the oil industry in our political economy