The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday released draft Clean Air Act permits for Shell’s planned oil exploration in federal offshore waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, which are parts of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. The draft permits are subject to public comment and will undoubtedly be litigated by environmental pressure groups.
Shell has been trying for more than four years to drill in 10-year lease tracts for which it paid the federal government more than $2 billion. Shell has also invested well over $1 billion in building the infrastructure that offshore exploratory drilling requires. If oil is discovered, then Shell would make huge further investments to begin production and connect the fields to the Trans Alaska Pipeline. Shell would pay a royalty to the federal treasury for every barrel produced.
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.
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 Fourteen Republicans in the House have withdrawn their names as co-sponsors.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).
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced on Thursday that the federal government would release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to counteract supply disruptions in the global oil market. In addition, the other member nations of the International Energy Agency would release another thirty million barrels.
Thirty million barrels is the largest single release in the history of the SPR, but is insignificant compared to total global daily consumption of roughly 80 million barrels. The Washington Post noted in an editorial on Friday that the crisis the Obama Administration is trying to deal with is that “President Obama’s re-election prospects will be harmed if national discontent over high gasoline prices continues. The oil release could be seen as a way for the president to take credit for gas prices that are falling anyway….”
Rory Cooper at the Heritage Foundation’s Foundry discusses what a stupid idea this is and how it fits in with all of President Obama’s other phony, counter-productive energy policies. Instead of tapping the SPR, why doesn’t the President announce that the federal government is opening federal lands and offshore areas to new oil and gas exploration? That would increase global oil production and lower gasoline prices now and over the long term. The reason is because President Obama and his Administration favor much higher gas prices. The SPR release simply helps delay implementation of his policies until after the 2012 election.
The ironically-named Center for American Progress posted a blog by Daniel Weiss and Stewart Boss this week that argues that conservative groups are opposing the T. Boone Pickens Earmark bill (H. R. 1380) that would provide subsidies to Big Natural Gas on the grounds that subsidies distort the market, while at the same time the same groups are defending subsidies to Big Oil. For the record, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for which I work, opposes all subsidies and mandates. These include subsidies to oil companies. The claim that groups like CEI support tax subsidies for oil companies is based on the ridiculous re-definition by the left of standard business deductions taken by all companies as tax subsidies when taken by oil companies.
Weiss’s lengthy blog is predictably inane. But it is obtuse even by the standards of the Center for American Progress. Big Oil and Big Natural Gas are one and the same. BP America is the largest producer of natural gas in the United States. Exxon Mobil owns the world’s largest privately-owned reserves of natural gas. Thus, by supporting multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for natural gas, the Center for American Progress have convicted themselves of being in the pocket of the oil and gas industry. They are almost certainly being paid off by T. Boone Pickens to flack for the Pickens-Your-Pockets Plan.
The National Chamber Foundation’s Campaign for Free Enterprise has announced that Jeffrey Immelt will be the keynote speaker at their Jobs for America Summit on July 11 at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, is America’s leading crony capitalist and promoter of cap-and-trade legislation. No word on whether the speakers will include fellow cap-and-trade promoters Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, and John Bryson, former CEO of Edison International, whom President Obama has nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. These proponents of energy-rationing polices are willing to raise energy prices and thereby make people poorer and destroy American jobs because they calculate that it will boost their companies’ profits.
President Barack Obama this week nominated John Bryson to be Secretary of Commerce. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) immediately announced that he would try to defeat Bryson’s confirmation by the Senate. It’s easy to see why Inhofe didn’t have to spend much time weighing Bryson’s qualifications. Bryson is a model crony capitalist, lifelong professional environmentalist, and leading promoter of cap-and-trade legislation to raise energy prices.
Here is what Bryson said at a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009: “Greenhouse gas legislation – either with a tax or with a cap and trade, which is a more complicated way of getting at it, but it has the advantage politically of sort of hiding the fact that you have a tax, but at the same – you know that’s what you’re trying to do, trying to raise price of carbon….” He went on to say that the Waxman-Markey and other cap-and-trade bills in Congress would not raise energy prices enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the required amount, so that he also favored federal regulations, such as renewable requirements for electric utilities, on top of cap-and-trade. Later, Bryson referred to Waxman-Markey as a “moderate but acceptable bill.”
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Update on the Boondoggle Bandwagon
The controversy over the T. Boone Pickens Earmark Bill, H. R. 1380, continued to grow this week. Three more Republicans joined Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) in getting off the Boonedoggle Bandwagon and withdrew as co-sponsors. They are Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), and Tim Griffin (R-Ark.). The complete list of 187 co-sponsors can be found here.
A joint letter organized by Heritage Action for America and signed by seventeen conservative organizations opposing the bill was sent to the Hill. Pickens himself published an op-ed co-authored by flack-for-hire Denise Bode in Politico that was full of his usual blend of self regard, bluster, and misinformation. Pickens and Bode claimed in the op-ed that the House Republican Study Committee has endorsed his bill. It has not, and Politico quickly corrected Pickens. They also claimed that wind power is now cheaper than new coal-fired power.
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After a five-month review, the Obama Administration announced this week that it had gotten rid of, was going to get rid of, or was considering getting rid of several dozen unnecessary regulations. The total savings could add up to several billions of dollars a year.
As part of the rollout, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was reviewing 31 regulations for elimination. EPA also announced that it had suspended the new rules regulating milk spills under the Clean Water Act. That will save dairy farmers an estimated $146 million a year. Ending another regulation will save gas station owners $67 million a year.
This exercise indicates the level of contempt that President Barack Obama and his Administration have for the American people. They think that we are so stupid that they can fool us with some piddling trimming while they push full speed ahead with their regulatory onslaught. As Wayne Crews of CEI shows in Ten Thousand Commandments: an Annual Snapshot of the Regulatory State, the Obama Administration has over 4000 new regulations in the pipeline. The EPA is trying to raise energy prices for all Americans and destroy jobs by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. And EPA is also targeting specific industries, such as coal, with job-killing regulations.
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The 2012 presidential election is starting to bend some of the Obama Administration’s environmental and energy policies. I have noted previously that the White House realizes that gas prices are a huge threat to President Barack Obama’s re-election. Consequently, the President is trying to shift the blame to oil companies and speculators while at the same time talking up what his Administration is doing to increase domestic oil production. The reality, of course, is that the Obama Administration has moved across the board to decrease oil production in federal lands and offshore areas.
Another sign of the Administration’s focus on the President’s re-election is that the Environmental Protection Agency has suddenly started paying attention to the concerns of industry. The timetables for new regulations of coal ash disposal and of surface coal mining in Appalachia have been extended. EPA announced last week that it was reconsidering, but not delaying, some parts of its new Clean Air Act rule for cement plants. This week EPA suspended indefinitely a similar rule for industrial boilers that it had promulgated in February. EPA said that it will conduct more analyses and re-open the public comment period for the boiler rule.
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