Alaska Governor Sean Parnell this week announced in Washington, DC plans to hold auctions in October to lease 15 million acres of state land for oil and gas exploration. The lease tracts include areas within state waters in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and onshore areas that are adjacent to ANWR.
In a written statement, Governor Parnell and Natural Resources Commissioner Dan Sullivan did not try to conceal that part of the plan is to drain oil reserves under ANWR that have been locked up by Congress since 1980 and under the National Petroleum Reserve. “By drilling on state land and waters adjacent to NPR-A and ANWR, developers may end up drawing untapped oil that lies beneath these federal lands.”
On Friday, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation issued proposed regulations for hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. “fracking,” the technological breakthrough in natural gas drilling that has roughly doubled known North American gas reserves in the last five years. Much of New York is within the geologic area known as the Marcellus Shale, which contains enormous gas deposits that became recoverable only with the advent of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. New York lawmakers imposed a moratorium on the process, due to unsubstantiated fears fanned by environmentalist special interests that the technique could contaminate New York City’s water supply. The drilling regulations are unnecessarily onerous, such that they might make gas extraction uneconomic, but they potentially could open up to 85% of the state’s Marcellus Shale deposits to hydraulic fracturing.
Across the pond, the French Parliament this week voted to ban hydraulic fracturing, making it the first country to enact legislation to outlaw the practice. However, the prospects for the gas drilling technique remain excellent in much of the rest of the European Union. Unlike France, which generates the preponderance of its electricity from nuclear and therefore has less of a need for expanded gas supplies, Central and Eastern Europe are embracing the technique. For countries in these regions, expanded domestic production of gas is preferable to relying on Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas export company.
Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday upheld the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Environmental groups had sued to change the listing to endangered, which would lead to much more restrictive protection measures. The State of Alaska and industry groups represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation had sued to de-list the polar bear.
The decision to uphold the Interior Department decision made during the George W. Bush administration does not stop the litigation underway to overturn a separate ruling made by then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and upheld by the current Secretary, Ken Salazar, that the threatened listing should not be used to force reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (which allegedly cause global warming which allegedly threatens the sea ice that polar bears depend on for hunting seals), but should be confined to protecting polar bear habitat in Alaska.
California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols made a surprise announcement this week to delay implementation of California’s cap-and-trade scheme by a year. Chairwoman Nichols claimed that the delay is to prevent “gaming” of the market for energy-rationing coupons, but the existence of functioning carbon markets in the Northeast (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) and in Europe (the Emissions Trading Scheme) suggests that the real reason for the delay was that the administration of Governor Jerry Brown wants to postpone burdening the state’s ailing economy by making energy more expensive.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute announced today that it is acting as co-counsel in a recently filed lawsuit in the state of New York against the state’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (a state cap and trade program). The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of small business owners in New York State who have faced increased electricity costs, and can be read here (.pdf). The American Spectator has a short write up here. The basis for the suit relies on the fact that elected officials in New York enrolled in the RGGI without approval by the state legislature. New York is the only state involved with RGGI who entered the initiative without approval from its legislature. As RGGI has forced electricity generators to purchase annual carbon allowances, it has raised the price of electricity for New York residents, effectively acting as a tax on electricity producers (those who produce more than 25 megawatts annually) in New York. [click to continue…]
[N.B. Ex-Vice President and massive carbon “polluter” Al Gore took to the pages of last week’s Rolling Stone in order to critique President Barack Obama’s supposedly timid response to global warming. This is Part 3 of a multipart series on the policy distortions peddled by Mr. Gore in the piece.]
Regarding the diplomacy of climate change mitigation, Mr. Gore wrote,
The failure [of the Congress] to pass legislation to limit global-warming pollution ensured that the much-anticipated Copenhagen summit on a global treaty in 2009 would also end in failure.
This is utter malarkey. The failure of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to produce a legally binding treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen summit had zero to do with the U.S. Congress, and everything to do with realist international relations.
As I wrote on this blog last May,
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The EPA has finalized label requirements for E15, backing down a bit from initial proposal which included the word ‘caution.’ The new label, as you can see, is a slightly less alarmist ‘attention.’ I will note that the new label does not point out in any form that ethanol will provide fewer miles per gallon for your vehicle. Adjusted for energy content, ethanol is more expensive than gasoline. However, if you do not adjust for energy content, ethanol costs less than gasoline. Being that the label doesn’t point this out, it seems that consumers might fill up with E15 as it will be slightly cheaper than E10, as few are aware that they will be reducing their fuel economy when moving from E10 to E15. I suspect that the government would be taking action if a private company were to do this.
The Corn Grower’s Association has weighed in, and they are unsurprisingly less than thrilled despite the fact that the EPA kowtowed to their demands:
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Employment Crash Requires Real Change in Washington
Rep. Fred Upton, Washington Times, 28 June 2011
Shale Gas Neo-Malthusianism: Poor Journalism at the Paper of Record
Michael Lynch, Master Resource, 28 June 2011
Obama Was Right about the SPR Release
Jerry Taylor & Peter Van Doren, Forbes, 27 June 2011
Why Your New Car Doesn’t Have a Spare
Sam Kazman, Wall Street Journal, 26 June 2011
The End Is Near for Faith in AGW
Russell Cook, WattsUpWithThat, 25 June 2011
[N.B. Ex-Vice President and massive carbon “polluter” Al Gore took to the pages of last week’s Rolling Stone in order to critique President Barack Obama’s supposedly timid response to global warming. This is Part 2 of a multipart series on the policy distortions peddled by Mr. Gore in the piece.]
Regarding the influence of special interests on climate policy, Mr. Gore wrote,
…a badly broken Senate that is almost completely paralyzed by the threat of filibuster and is controlled lock, stock and barrel by the oil and coal industries; a contingent of nominal supporters in Congress who are indentured servants of the same special interests that control most of the Republican Party…
… don’t give up on the political system. Even though it is rigged by special interests…
Mr. Gore would have you believe that his preferred climate policy, a cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme, failed due to opposition from hydrocarbon special interests. This is not true. In fact, cap-and-trade bills in the 110th and 111th Congresses were voted down by bi-partisan majorities of lawmakers, for a very simple reason: These politicians didn’t want to lose their jobs by enacting an energy tax and thereby angering their constituents, the preponderance of whom had (and continue to have) bigger concerns (read: jobs) than global warming, no matter how much Mr. Gore tried (and continues to try) to alarm them by blaming every disaster in the news—Floods! Droughts! Heat waves! Snow storms!—on climate change. That is, the failure of cap-and-trade in the Congress has little to do with hydrocarbon energy lobbies, and everything to do with the fact that Americans don’t want energy-rationing because they aren’t alarmed. Rightfully so.
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Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) are planning to introduce their version of the T. Boone Pickens Earmark bill this week. Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla.) released a list of 220 supporters of the Pickens-Your-Pocket Plan, which is H. R. 1380 in the House. The list is mostly companies, many of them small to medium in size, that hope to benefit from federal subsidies for natural gas vehicles and infrastructure.
It looks now like a failing effort. The pushback from free market and conservative groups has made a substantial dent in enthusiasm. Fourteen Republicans in the House have withdrawn their names as co-sponsors. That leaves 182 co-sponsors currently.
Here is the list of the Representatives who have gotten off the Boonedoggle Bandwagon: Steve Pearce (R-NM), Todd Akin (R-Mo), Glenn Thompson (R-Penna), Tim Griffin (R-Ark), Cory Gardner (R-Colo), Scott Tipton (R-Colo), Mike Coffman (R-Colo), Larry Bucshon (R-Ind), John Kline (R-Minn), Mike Kelly (R-Penna), Scott Rigell (R-Va), Blake Farenthold (R-Tex), Richard Nugent (R-Fla), and Joseph Pitts (R-Penna).
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