By a 225 to 188 vote, the House of Representatives yesterday passed H.R. 2279, the Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations Act.
This is excellent news. I posted about this worthy bill two days ago. Yesterday, I spoke at length about the bill to my colleague Ryan Young on his Liberty Week podcast. Have a listen here.
Yesterday, George Will wrote a column delighting in the fact that the # 1 selling vehicle in the U.S., for the 32nd year in a row, is the Ford F-150. He related the truck’s triumph to the President’s first term promise to put 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. To this end, the administration gave subsidies to manufacturers and regressive tax credits to buyers. Despite these goals and the carrots to achieve them, the American car-buying public largely has shunned electric vehicles, and instead has continued its love affair with large, powerful cars of the sort that are loathed by environmentalists. Will concludes that consumers won’t be forced by Big Brother.
I, for one, liked the column, and would add only that the President’s pledge for 1 million green cars was part of an equally silly promise to create 5 million green jobs. Of course, his administration fell embarrassingly short of meeting either goal. An evident corollary to the fact that the government can’t dictate consumer preferences is the state’s inability to centrally plan an industry, like “green energy.”
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, however, took issue with the piece. After condescending to Will for a few paragraphs, Chait asks & answers:
“So, are Americans on the whole flocking toward gas-guzzling vehicles? No, just the opposite”
EPA’s primary enabling statutes, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, are founded on cooperative federalism. Simply put, Congress intended for EPA and States to serve as partners in the mitigation of environmental pollution attendant to economic development.
Of course, in the four decades since these foundational environmental laws were enacted, there have been disagreements between States and EPA as to how best to clean the air and water. Nonetheless, the system for the most part worked as intended: The two governmental entities cooperated.
This changed on or about January 20th, 2009.
Elsewhere, I’ve explained the means by which EPA has been usurping the States’ rightful authority. Follow the embedded link to learn the “how”; as for the “what,” see the chart below. It depicts the number of federal implementation plans imposed by EPA, broken down into presidential terms. A federal implementation plan, or FIP, is the most extreme action the EPA can take against a State under the cooperative federalism scheme created by Congress. A FIP entails a complete EPA takeover from the state of the regulatory regime in question. With this in mind, the chart below speaks volumes about cooperative federalism as practiced in the Obama era:
Over at The Hill’s Congress Blog, I’ve a post regarding H.R. 2279, the Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations (REDO) act, which House leadership is expected to bring to the floor on Thursday. As is indicated by the bill’s title, the REDO act would cull needless and impractical statutory deadlines, and thereby limit opportunities for “sue and settle” policymaking.
I’ve excerpted the post below. Read the whole thing here.
Republican leadership in the House of Representatives has scheduled floor action this week on H.R. 2279, the Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations (REDO) Act. ‘Redo’ is an apt acronym for this worthy bill, which would afford Congress an opportunity to revise a decades-old mistake, and thereby strike at the heart of an insidious legal strategy known as “sue and settle.”
To be precise, H.R. 2279 would allow Congress to mitigate the ills caused by an overabundance of deadlines in environmental laws enacted during the 1970s. At the time, statutory deadlines, by which time federal agencies must execute their duties, were perceived as an innovation in Congressional oversight. In practice, however, they’ve wreaked havoc on the regulatory process.
…
You might wonder: How could missed deadlines cause harm? The answer is a function of another unfortunate legislative innovation dating to the disco era. At the behest of environmental litigation groups, Congress during the 1970s included in many regulatory laws a provision granting the public the right to sue EPA over the non-performance of non-discretionary duties. As a result, groups like Sierra Club are empowered to sue the agency in order to compel the agency to act on a past-due responsibility.
Because EPA is out of compliance with virtually all of its deadlines, it follows that establishing any deadline through litigation determines how EPA deploys its limited resources. Of course, giving priority among regulatory initiatives is no different than effectuating policy. To this end, impossible deadlines are conducive to a legal strategy known as “sue and settle.” The process starts when an environmental litigation group sues EPA over a missed deadline. Rather than contest the suit and defend the agency’s discretion, EPA immediately enters into settlement negotiations. Due to a revolving door between green groups and the EPA, parties to these suits often used to be colleagues. Thus, unelected bureaucrats and environmental special interests render policy by establishing agency priorities, far removed from voter accountability. In fact, most of EPA’s regulatory responsibilities pursuant to the Clean Air Act are dictated by sue and settle litigation.
As reported yesterday, EPA finally published the proposed Carbon Pollution Standard in today’s Federal Register, thereby initiating a 60-day period during which the agency accepts comment from the public.
This morning, I submitted initial comments. Below, I posted the comments; above, I posted a screen shot of the agency’s confirmation receipt. In them, I argue that the rule is illegal, due to a number of flaws. For starters, it’s based on speculative technology, known as carbon capture and sequestration. More fundamentally, the Carbon Pollution Standard would result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the very “pollutant” that is supposed to be controlled. EPA projects that CO2 captured from a power plant will be used to enhance oil drilling. But the agency failed to take into account the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the combustion of oil. According to my calculation, every kilogram of CO2 captured engenders 1.6 kilograms of CO2 from combusted oil. Of course, a regulation that worsens the supposed problem is absurd.
Every comment matters, even if you are not steeped in legal and regulatory minutiae. If you’d like to comment, go to www.regulations.gov and then type into the search box “EPA-HQ-OAR-2013-0495.” This will take you to the website where EPA stores all its supporting information about the regulation. In the top right corner of this page, there’s a blue button that says “comment now.” You can take it from there.
My colleague Chris Horner appeared on Fox News’s Hannity last night to discuss the cause of the big chill that’s gripped much of the nation. His debate with clean tech investor Howard Gould starts about four minutes in.
In a keynote speech at the Brookings Institution today, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) called for an end to the decades-old ban on U.S. crude oil exports.
Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, also released a white paper on U.S. energy export policy, A Signal to the World: Renovating the Architecture of U.S. Energy Exports.
Total U.S. energy production reached its highest level ever in July 2013, Murkowski noted in her speech. As a consequence, U.S. exports of coal, dry natural gas, and finished petroleum products are at their highest levels on record.
However, those welcome developments came about “in spite of the federal government, not because of it, as the president frequently seems to imply,” she said.
More importantly, U.S. energy trade rules “were written long ago for a now bygone world in which scarcity, not abundance, was the prevailing mindset,” Murkowski noted. Outmoded regulations hamper exports of liquefied natural gas and virtually prohibit exports of crude oil and condensates. This antiquated policy architecture holds back the leading source of new investment, job creation, and competitive advantage in the U.S. economy.
Worse, the current regime creates significant economic risk. U.S. refineries were not built to handle the light sweet crude produced in the Bakken and Eagleford shale plays. The export ban could soon create a glut, forcing producers to choose between losing money on sales or leaving the oil in the ground. The oil boom could become a bust, warns International Energy Agency executive director Maria van der Hoeven, whom Murkowski cites.
Status-quo defenders claim lifting the ban would increase gasoline prices by reducing the discount at which crude oil trades in U.S. markets. That reasoning is flawed. As Blake Clayton of the Council on Foreign Relations points out, the discount currently benefits a handful of refiners, not consumers, because gasoline prices reflect global crude and finished petroleum product prices, not domestic refiners’ production costs:
As it stands, the primary beneficiaries of the export ban are a few fortunate oil refineries in the central United States—not U.S. consumers—that are able to buy crude oil at depressed prices before selling it at prevailing market rates. Current law arbitrarily works to the benefit of these companies.
Crude oil exports would likely benefit consumers not only by fueling GDP growth but also by moderating gasoline prices. By spurring investment in production, freedom to export would accelerate the increase in global petroleum supply. That, in turn, would put downward pressure on global petroleum prices — the chief factor determining gasoline prices. As Murkowski’s white paper explains:
First, gasoline is a petroleum product and petroleum products are subject to global pricing, just like crude oil. To the extent that greater U.S. production of crude oil puts downward pressure on inter-national oil prices (e.g., the Brent benchmark), then production increases have benefited U.S. consumers by marginally lowering gasoline and crude oil prices.
By the same token, retaining the ban puts consumers at risk. A shale oil glut would depress production and slow the growth in global supply, putting upward pressure on gasoline prices:
To the extent that the crude oil export ban contributes to supply disruptions and decelerating oil production (which affects employment), then the American consumer will suffer the consequences. If the refining mismatch causes production to become shut-in, as some analysts suggest, then prices could actually rise and increase U.S. dependence on imports.
Murkowski believes the Obama administration already has the authority to lift the ban: [click to continue…]
Inside EPA’s Dawn Reeves reports this afternoon that EPA tomorrow will publish in the Federal Register a proposal of the agency’s signature climate policy, the Carbon Pollution Standard. To much fanfare, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy last September 20 unveiled a pre-publication version of the proposal, but the measure takes affect only after it’s been published in the Federal Register. It remains unknown why the rule was held up for an unusually long three and a half month delay, but last week I speculated that the agency was having difficulty adopting a legal justification for its proposed determination that all new coal-fired power plants must install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). In order for the Carbon Pollution Standard to pass judicial review, CCS technology must be “commercially viable.” As I’ve written repeatedly, legal precedent together with market realities strongly indicate that CCS has not been adequately demonstrated, and is, therefore, an impermissible basis for the proposed regulation.
I’ve not yet had the time to read the final proposal, a copy of which is available here, but InsideEPA’s Reeves reports that it has not changed significantly from the pre-publication version. Instead, sources tell Reeves that the agency has bolstered its explanation that CCS is (supposedly) commercially viable in supporting documentation, which isn’t yet publicly available. That material should be posted online tomorrow, at which time I’ll pour over it and report back to you. Stay tuned!
The New Yorker’s humorist Andy Borowitz has penned a pugilistic piece of satire, about all the people who’ve been punched out because they remarked in public that the freezing cold temperatures currently gripping much of the nation are incongruent with global warming. Hilarious! Read the short, smug note here.
Presumably, Borowitz’s antipathy for “deniers” in this instance is based on their having mistaken weather for climate. Indeed, it’s a common error. Consider, for example:
Today’s Climatewire (subscription required) reports that in the UK last year, “more than 30,000 winter deaths were thought to be caused by fuel poverty, up by a third from the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics.”
What makes fuel poverty deadly? “Poor heating and a lack of insulation are known to increase the likelihood of strokes in the elderly and to exacerbate asthma and rheumatic disease in all age groups,” explains Climatewire correspondent Erica Rex.
Until last month, UK law defined fuel poverty as a household that spends more than 10% of its income “to maintain an adequate level of warmth.” The law now defines it as “above average fuel costs” that leave households with “a residual income below the official poverty line.” That seems obfuscatory. Implicitly excluded from the revised definition are households that can’t afford to heat their homes because of high average fuel costs.
As Rex notes, the redefinition instantly reduced the official tally of fuel poor in the UK from 3.2 million to 2.4 million, or from 15% to 11%. The reclassification does not mitigate the hardship of people like “Gemma,” a single mother of three interviewed for the article, who skips meals “just to keep the heating on.”
Regardless of how fuel poverty is defined, the issue is heating up, partly because Britain is facing the worst winter in 60 years, but also because government policies mandate increasing reliance on renewable energy.
According to Department of Energy and Climate Change figures, so-called green policies account for “only” 10% of the UK heating bill. On the other hand, DECC projects those policies to increase electricity prices 33% by 2020 and 41% by 2030.
Although commonly associated with the UK and Ireland, fuel poverty is more pervasive. The map below shows the percentage of European households that cannot afford to keep their homes adequately warm.
Source: EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) [click to continue…]
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