Long, holiday weekends are great opportunities to catch up on reading, and this past weekend proved no exception. A few of the items I read over the break are worth sharing.

First is a roundtable discussion on energy exports and global energy security recently conducted and published by the American Council for Capital Foundation.

The forum brought together a trio of astute policy experts – Columbia University’s Jason Bordoff, Dartmouth’s Matthew Slaughter, and Frank Verrastro of the Center of Strategic and International Studies – to discuss the various geopolitical impacts surrounding the possibility of allowing U.S. crude oil exports.

The three spoke to the idea that strengthening global energy security ultimately strengthens America’s national security, and loosening export restrictions is perhaps the best way to achieve that.

Said Jason Bordoff: “I think the arguments around energy security and … geopolitics are probably even stronger for allowing exports [than economic arguments]. I think it would make the U.S. more resilient, not less, to supply disruptions elsewhere in the world.”

Similarly worth reading is the latest report from the Manhattan Institute’s Mark Mills about what’s next for the U.S. shale industry.

There’s no question the rapid increase in oil supplies from America’s shale regions has helped drive global prices lower, and this lower-price environment impacts our industry. Some industry critics call this the end of the shale revolution.

Mills, however, sees this as a temporary blip: “Continued technological progress, particularly in big-data analytics, has the U.S. shale industry poised for another, longer boom, a ‘Shale 2.0’.”

According to Mills, the shale industry operates more like Silicon Valley than conventional hydrocarbon or alternative energy sector operators – even if there is some overlap here – and he has some intriguing ideas about how the next several decades will play out.

Of course, it’s not worth thinking too much about the future if we don’t understand the past.

To that end, economic historian John Steele Gordon has a great piece in the most recent Barron’s showing the pace of technological innovations in pursuit of creating artificial light.

From fire in caves to whale-oil lamps to the kerosene refined from oil pumped out of Pennsylvania and beyond, this evolution and progress led to the birth of the modern world. It also explains how the modern oil and gas industry came to be.

Curiously, our industry is rooted in lighting homes and cities but then advanced to fueling modern transportation. That is something Col. Edwin Drake and other early industry pioneers could have scarcely imagined. Yet, now, the oil and gas industry is making inroads again into lighting and more, thanks to the increasing application of natural gas for power generation worldwide.

Few would have predicted that even a decade ago.

“Inventors, like geographical explorers, often don’t know where they are going or where they are when they get there,” writes Gordon, author of the celebrated history An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. “But that doesn’t stop some explorers and some inventors from changing the world.” Indeed.

Each of the articles or studies is well worth your time, and I encourage you to check them out. And please let me know if there’s anything you have caught that you think Perspectives readers might benefit from reading.