Today, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on “The Future of Natural Gas.” There were no partisan or ideological fireworks. The expert witnesses were Howard Gruenspecht (U.S. Energy Information Administration), Ernest Moniz (MIT), and George Blitz (Dow Chemical).
Moniz argued the environmental risks associated with natural gas were “challenging but manageable.” Blitz sounded a note of caution. Industry uses natural gas both as a feedstock and as a manufacturing fuel. Policy-driven increases in natural gas demand due to, for example, a Clean Energy Standard, EPA’s Utility MACT Rule, or tax incentives for natural gas vehicles could do what high gas prices did in the early 2000s — close factories and offshore jobs. I may blog on their testimonies later on.
Gruenspecht’s testimony provides a valuable primer on natural gas production, demand, reserves, and trends. This post excerpts some of the key facts and figures he presented.
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A collective cry of outrage could be heard across the D.C. urbanista interwebs upon the announcement that Ward 6 D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells would be losing his chairmanship of the Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee. Unfortunately given the political dynamics (read: lefty-enviro-urban-fetishists have way too much pull in this town!), less is generally more when it comes to transportation policy in Washington, D.C. Wells, in addition to being an anti-gambling nannystater, is well known for being behind many of the District’s wasteful, anti-auto “livability” programs. His official website’s tagline is even “Building a livable, walkable city.” For a brief explanation of why the New Urbanists’ social-engineering concept of “livability” is just code for “stupid handouts to yuppies,” see my recent post on OpenMarket.org regarding the federal Department of Transportation’s TIGER 3 grants program.
As the anti-mobility, pro-gentrification-subsidy Greater Greater Washington laments (as I rejoice), this decision is worsening the already low morale among the District Department of Transportation’s most worthless bureaucrats. Chief trolley and bike-share cheerleader Scott Kubly, who announced he will be leaving his post at DDOT, doesn’t appear to have been driven out as a result of Council Chairman Kwame Brown’s committee shakeup. But this latest departure of a Fenty-era apparatchik is making clear that much of the city is sick and tired of local politicians basing transportation and land-use policies around the silly prejudices concerns of wealthy gentrifiers. Ex-Mayor Fenty’s education policy was fingered by many in the clueless media as the culprit for his loss to now-Mayor Gray, as the awful teachers’ union contributed heavily to Gray’s campaign. But ask a resident of Ward 7 or Ward 8 about what annoyed them most about Fenty’s “white-washing”: “bike lanes” are usually at the top of the list.
While I am hardly optimistic about the overall future prospects of the notoriously corrupt D.C. city government, as an advocate for sensible transportation policy that actually enhances residents’ mobility and quality of life, recent steps taken by key city politicians are a breath of fresh air after years of official pandering to well-to-do urbanists.
Obama Backs Books Bailout
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 19 July 2011
Big Bulb + Big Green = Big Profit Bulb Bans
John LaPlante, The Michigan View, 18 July 2011
The U.S. Isn’t Running out of Oil
Stephen Eule, Real Clear Energy, 18 July 2011
Carbon Dioxide’s Impact Is Overstated
Mark Landsbaum, Orange County Register, 18 July 2011
Newest Alarmist Meme: We’re Victims!
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 17 July 2011
America is a beacon of capitalism, so it can be jarring to discover one of its largest industries operates under the thumb of the state. As my colleague Iain Murray and I noted in National Review,
The $330 billion industry has been a redoubt of state control for almost 100 years. Early in the 20th century, pro-intervention Progressives concluded that electric companies would consolidate into “natural” monopolies that would exploit consumers. This was a curious conclusion to reach at a time when electric companies were competing vigorously in many cities, but for those who put faith in the regulatory state, theory trumps observation at every turn.
The Progressives’ remedy for this theoretical drift toward natural monopoly, offered without any apparent appreciation of irony, was to establish government-mandated monopolies. States created commissions with the regulatory power to outlaw competition among utilities and set electricity rates for consumers. By the end of the Great Depression, almost all Americans bought their electricity from government-backed monopolies, and they continue to do so to this day, whatever regulation advocates might say about electricity deregulation in the 1990s.
The upshot is that your utility is controlled by your local government, so it is only as good as your local government. With that in mind, Pepco’s status as the “most hated” company in America reflects poorly on politicians in Maryland, the utility’s primary service area.
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Major automakers’ production plans for electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) “are far below sales targets set by countries,” announced the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a press release accompanying the agency’s newly updated Electric Vehicle Roadmap report.
Major manufacturer production plans add up to 0.9 million units by 2015 and 1.4 million annually by 2020. In contrast, governments have set sales targets of 1.5 million units by 2015 and 7 million annually by 2020.
Evidently, policymakers have mis-underestimated (as a former President might say) market demand for EVs and PHEVs. The gap between production plans and political targets would be larger still without political props for those vehicles such as a federal tax credit up to $7,500 and billions in federal R&D support.
IEA believes more incentives and R&D — including coordinated federal, state, and local support for re-charging infrastructure — will do the trick. Now there’s a big surprise!
Arthur Brisbane of the NYT this weekend published an op-ed which reads a bit like a ‘mea culpa’ in response to repeated criticisms of reporter Ian Urbina’s jumbling attack on natural gas hydraulic fracturing published late last month:
I also asked why The Times didn’t include input from the energy giants, like Exxon Mobil, that have invested billions in natural gas recently. If shale gas is a Ponzi scheme, I wondered, why would the nation’s energy leader jump in?
Mr. Urbina and Adam Bryant, a deputy national editor, said the focus was not on the major companies but on the “independents” that focus on shale gas, because these firms have been the most vocal boosters of shale gas, have benefited most from federal rules changes regarding reserves and are most vulnerable to sharp financial swings. The independents, in industry parlance, are a diverse group that are smaller than major companies like Exxon Mobil and don’t operate major-brand gas stations.
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Exhausting the Reserve Fund: The Big Picture Limits to Big Government
Richard Ebeling, Master Resource, 18 July 2011
Phony “Reform” Emerges on Ethanol
Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, 17 July 2011
Britain’s Green Suicide
Matt Ridley, Rational Optimist, 17 July 2011
Why Hasn’t the Earth Warmed in 15 Years?
Patrick Michaels, Forbes, 15 July 2011
Greenpeace Destroys Crops in Act of Eco-terrorism
Miles Gough, Cosmos, 14 July 2011
In the summer of 2009, former Rep. Rick Boucher* (D-VA) negotiated a deal on behalf a small block of lawmakers representing coal-dependent districts in the House of Representatives, whereby they agreed to support the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy-rationing bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act) in exchange for generous taxpayer subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration. CCS is an as-yet-undemonstrated technology that would capture millions of tons of greenhouse gases, concentrate them, and then pipe them into underground geologic formations for permanent storage. The imprudence of Rep. Boucher’s “deal” was evidenced last Thursday, when American Electric Power, an Ohio-based utility, shelved a $668 million pilot project to retrofit with CCS a 1,300 megawatt coal-fired power plant in New Haven, West Virginia. The Department of Energy had agreed to pay for half the cost of the project, yet it was still too risky for AEP.
The failure of this CCS demonstration project, despite ultra-generous taxpayer subsidies, is not the only reason that lawmakers from coal-states should be wary of this “deal” (i.e., trading a cap-and-trade vote for CCS subsidies). Even if AEP had continued with the CCS retrofit, environmental extremists, for whom coal is an evil, would have litigated at every turn. Given the uncertain science of permanently storing millions of tons of gases underground, there would be virtually unlimited opportunities for these special interests to sue.
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The price of everything is going up and much of the increase can be traced back to energy costs. With unemployment high and the economy threatening a double dip, wouldn’t you think our elected officials would be doing everything possible to cut energy costs and, therefore, lower prices to help ease the pain the public is feeling? Not!
Legislators in more than half the states have voted for mandatory renewable energy standards—usually called an RPS for Renewable Portfolio Standards. While the numbers vary state-by-state, an RPS generally requires that an increasing percentage of a state’s electricity come from renewable sources—primarily wind and solar—by set dates. Most of the mandates coincide with the year: 15% by 2015, 20% by 2020, etc. Most states voted in the RPS back when the economy was thriving and “green” energy sounded like a good idea—after all the wind and the sun are “free.” Voting against “renewables” was akin to not liking puppies. Elected officials from both parties have voted for their state’s RPS. But, renewable energy systems have not proven to be free, and most cannot survive without special mandates and subsidies paid for by your tax dollars.
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