Last week I spoke with an editorialist at the Orange County Register, about the silliness that is the California Energy Commission’s latest efficiency mandate, for battery chargers. On Saturday, the paper ran an editorial about our conversation. The entire editorial, “Bureaucrats Eyeing Your Device Chargers,” is reprinted below. Afterwards, I have two extra thoughts on energy efficiency policy.
It’s enough to make the Energizer Bunny pound his drum in protest. This month the California Energy Commission imposed new regulations – the Appliance Efficiency Standards for Battery Chargers. According to the CEC’s website, “The purpose of this rulemaking is to adopt efficiency standards, certification and marking requirements for large and small battery charger systems.”
News You Can Use Hedge Fund Wins Big Bet against Solar
In a quarterly newsletter, the hedge fund Greenlight Capital, Inc. announced that it has closed its short position in First Solar, “one of the most profitable shorts in the history” of its funds. Stock prices for First Solar, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan from the same program that propped up Solyndra, plummeted primarily because Germany rolled back solar power subsidies.
Inside the Beltway Myron Ebell
Obama Punts on Keystone (again)
President Barack Obama on Wednesday, 18th January, announced that he would not approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in the Gulf States. A provision in the payroll tax cut extension legislation required the President to make a decision before 21st February based on the national interest. The President’s statement used the deadline to blame Congress for his decision:
“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people.”
The New York Times was almost alone among major papers in supporting the President’s decision. The Washington Post noted that the President’s own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness had reported the day before that the United States needed to be building more energy infrastructure, including pipelines. Post columnist Robert Samuelson wrote that Obama’s decision was an “act of national insanity.”
There is general feeling in air that the American Dream is a thing of the past, unattainable due to an economy riddled with stagnation and strangling regulations. Environmentalists have striven to produce this nightmare in their relentless aim to handicap all industrial progress in this country that might have any element of risk to a “clean” environmental way of life. They want you to give up the dream. I am here to share with you that the story of America as the Land of Opportunity is still alive, but is at stake.
What is fast-becoming the main talking point against the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline is the claim that greater access to Canadian crude oil would notenhance U.S. energy security.
According to pipeline opponents, most of the petroleum products made from Keystone crude would be exported by Gulf Coast refiners to Europe, South America, and Asia rather than sold in U.S. domestic markets. Thus, opponents contend, Canadian oil coming through the pipeline would displace little if any oil imported from unstable, undemocratic, or unfriendly countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) made a media splash with this talking point at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last month. Keystone, he said, would not “back out” any oil we import from the Middle East if it simply turns the USA into a “middle man” for exporting diesel fuel and other finished petroleum products made with Canadian crude. He noted that nothing in TransCanada company’s long-term sales contracts with Gulf Coast refiners ensures that products made from Canadian crude would be sold to U.S. consumers.
Markey challenged TransCanada exec Alex Pourbaix to support legislation prohibiting Gulf Coast refiners from exporting petroleum products refined from Keystone crude. Clever! Pourbaix could not support Markey’s proposal without jeopardizing the sales contracts on which the pipeline project’s commercial viability depends. Yet he could not reject Markey’s proposal without appearing to confirm that Keystone is a plot by TransCanada and Gulf Coast refiners to export more oil overseas. Pourbaix did reject Markey’s proposal, but without explaining why an export ban would be a mischievous ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem. [click to continue…]
Professional environmentalists are cheering President Obama’s rejection of construction permits for the KeystoneXL Pipeline. They are the only ones cheering, aside from a few NIMBY groups and The New York Times Obama’s always-loyal damage control cohorts. Even The Washington Postvoted against Obama in this struggle. The pipeline was a small, but important part of our energy infrastructure and none of the arguments put forth against construction of the KeystoneXL Pipeline are convincing.
1. An initial argument claims that the KeystoneXL Pipeline will somehow not provide energy security for the United States.
Because consumers from around the country (and the world) use oil, pipelines are necessary to transfer mind-bogglingly large amounts of it around the country each day. Imagine a scenario where we randomly begin shutting down oil and natural gas pipelines around the United States. The obvious result of decreasing our capacity would be decreased security, as we are less capable of moving oil around our country to deal with shocks, disasters, etc. Now think about what adding a pipeline does: it increases our capacity to transport oil around the country. Ultimately, this must increase to some extent our energy security. [click to continue…]
Yesterday I was invited on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, to participate on a panel about the President’s decision this week to punt (again) on the Keystone XL pipeline. Video is below. I’ve also included Al Jazeera’s write-up of the segment.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s words and deeds are far apart when it comes to hydraulic fracturing, the technolution in natural gas drilling that has roughly doubled economically obtainable reserves of U.S. gas in only the last decade.
Last evening, Energy and Environment News PM (subscription required) reported that, “U.S. EPA wants to boost the public’s confidence in natural gas so production levels continue to rise, an agency official said today at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.”
Last month in Pavilion, Wyoming, however, EPA imparted the opposite. Far from “boosting the public’s confidence” in hydraulic fracturing (which now is virtually synonymous with the American gas industry), EPA perpetrated shoddy science in an effort to undercut the drilling technique’s public image.
According to enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ridiculous statement. Well, now government scientists must be added to the list of the so addled: Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horses mouth, a NASA report titled “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects”:
“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.”
Oops. There’s an inconvenient truth for you.
You can almost feel the disappointment seeping through their ink as major media outlets around the world are forced to report on a flurry of new data showing – horror! – the world may not be going up in flames after all. Yet still they cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, an unnatural respite from Man’s descent into unnatural global conflagration.
In this excerpt from Eco-nomics: What everyone should know about the environment, economist Richard Stroup explains why there’s always a cost to environmental regulations. This is because when people are faced with choices, they must always give up something to get something. Many environmentalists ignore this cost as Stroup explains.
Eco-nomics was published in 2003
The Forest Guardians, an advocacy group based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sued the federal government to stop logging on the national forest in New Mexico. The group thought that the forests should be preserved rather than cut down, and it pushed for such policies during the 1990s. In 2000, a fire began around Los Alamos, New Mexico, that eventually wiped out many of the forests that the Guardian wanted to preserve. When the fire was over, Rex Wahl, executive director of the Forest Guardians, reconsidered his position. “Judicious cutting of small trees is what’s needed,” he said.
This example illustrates one of the problems with environmental issues. Things are not always what they seem. The Forest Guardians thought that its goal should be to preserve trees. Yet by ignoring the need to thin the forest and remove dead and dying trees, they allowed the forest to become vulnerable to wildfire, and the ultimate destruction of the forests was much greater.
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