Author Bryce to speak at Streich Lecture Series

Author and journalist Robert Bryce will be the guest speaker for the 34th Annual Streich Family Lecture Series on Free Enterprise Thursday, Feb. 18, in Bridwell Auditorium in the Dillard College of Business Administration at Midwestern State University. Bryce will speak twice - at 3:30 p.m. primarily for the MSU community and again at 7 p.m. for the public. His topic will be "More Energy, Please: How Increasing Energy Use Promotes a Richer, Freer World."

As part of Dillard International Week, points in Bryce's presentation will include information on fuels and policies that could reduce poverty worldwide, Europe's track on energy, and what the Paris climate agreement really means. He will discuss the ongoing surge in global coal use as well as the need for more electricity to help alleviate energy poverty.

Bryce has written about the energy business for nearly three decades. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, The Washington Post, The American Conservative, and CounterPunch. He spent 12 years writing for The Austin Chronicle.

From 2006 to September 2010, he worked as the managing editor of the Houston-based online publication, Energy Tribune. In April 2010, he joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in the think tank's Center for Energy Policy and the Environment.

Bryce's latest book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, was published in 2014. The book shows how innovation and the unstoppable human desire to make things smaller, faster, lighter, denser, and cheaper is providing consumers with cheaper and more abundant energy, faster computing, lighter vehicles, and many other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and environmental protection.

Bryce's first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, received rave reviews and was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate, was published in 2004. His third book, Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence," was published in March 2008. The American magazine called Gusher "a strong and much-needed dose of reality." A review of Gusher by William Grimes of The New York Times said that Bryce "reveals himself in the end as something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary."

In May 2009, his essay on the corn ethanol scam was included in Food Inc., a book published in conjunction with the hit documentary by Eric Schlosser of the same name. In 2010, Bryce published Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy, and the Real Fuels of the Future. In a review of Power Hungry in The Wall Street Journal, Trevor Butterworth called the book "unsentimental, unsparing, and impassionedà."

The Streich Family Lecture Series is named in honor of the Streich family, owners of former area Gibson's Discount Centers, and is designed to give MSU students, staff, and the public insight into the American free enterprise system in relation to today's economic status. Former speakers include Bloomberg economist Richard Yamarone, Texas businessman T. Boone Pickens, Dr. Robert Z. Lawrence of the Brookings Institute, Lindley H. Clark Jr. of The Wall Street Journal, international economist Dr. John Marthinsen, and Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.

Admission is free. The event is sponsored by the Dillard College of Business Administration, the Mamie Raborn Center for Economic Education, and Delta Sigma Pi. For more information, call the Dillard College of Business at (940) 397-4379.