William Yeatman

[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.

[click to continue…]

Yesterday morning, the Energy Opportunity program at the Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank, held a panel on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed “Utility MACT” rule to regulate coal- and oil-fired power plants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. This rule, if implemented, would be one of the costliest regulations, ever, and its primary justification is to protect pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen from the deposition onto inland, freshwater bodies of mercury emitted from American power plants. Notably, U.S. power plants contribute 2 percent of total mercury deposition across America, so they are a rather small component of this supposed problem. In future posts, I’ll contend that there are more reasonable methods of protecting the scores (hundreds?) of pregnant women who are also subsistence fishers, other than overhauling the electricity generation industry at a cost of $10 billion annually (EPA’s estimate) to $100 billion annually (industry’s estimate). In this post, I only want to note how extraordinarily unfair and unbalanced was the Center for American Progress’s panel yesterday. Consider the panelists:

[click to continue…]

In mid-April, I testified before a Colorado Senate Committee that was considering whether to approve a Regional Haze State Implementation Plan (“RHSIP”) to improve visibility at National Parks. The purpose of my testimony was to inform Committee Members that the RHSIP before them violated Colorado’s statutory prohibition on pollution controls pursuant to the Clean Air Act that are more stringent than what the federal government requires. That is, I told them that the RHSIP was illegal. I explained to the Senators that correcting the illegal components of the RHSIP would save Colorado ratepayers more than $120 million. (For background on the RHSIP, click here. Video of my testimony is available here.)

The Committee heard an entirely different story from lawyers representing natural gas producers,  Xcel Energy, and environmentalist ex-Governor Bill Ritter. These lawyers’ clients were staunch proponents of the RHSIP, because it included a strategy to switch fuels from coal to natural gas for almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity. For the gas and utility sector, billions of dollars were at stake; for ex-Governor Ritter, the fuel switching plan enhanced his national profile among environmentalists. These special interest lawyers refused to address my allegations of illegality (because I was right). Instead, they told the Committee that unless the General Assembly approved the RHSIP immediately and without alteration, the federal government would swoop in and usurp Colorado’s air quality planning authority.

[click to continue…]