America has an abundance of natural resources, yet our policies keep them locked up. We can’t drill in the Gulf. ANWAR is off limits. Mining is nearly impossible due to regulations. “Endangered species” threaten existing supplies.
Meanwhile resource discoveries are being made and developed the world over.
Newt Gingrich, currently campaigning for the GOP Presidential nomination, rightfully regrets appearing in a 2008 advertisement with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which they both exhort political leaders to fight global warming (presumably by enacting a cap-and-trade policy that would ration energy use). The ad, which is available here, was produced by a global warming agitprop non-profit founded by former Vice President Al Gore.
According to the Daily Caller’s Jeff Poor, Gingrich last week told a panel on Fox’s “Special Report,” that the ad “is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in years.” I agree with him that the ad was a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s the dumbest thing he’s done in years. The dumbest—and also the greediest and most inhumane—of Gingrich’s recent actions is his having shilled for ethanol.
California’s environmentalist leadership is so desperate to go green that regulators will approve any renewable energy project with a high chance of being completed. Cost doesn’t matter. Nor must the project be necessary to meet the state’s renewable energy goals. The only criterion that counts is feasibility. If you can build it, state officials will approve it.
This is an outrageously low bar, yet it was the precedent set last week, when the California Public Utilities Commission, by a 4 to 1 vote, approved a 25-year contract for Pacific Gas and Electric to buy electricity generated by the Mojave Solar project, a 250-megawatt solar power plant that will soon break ground in San Bernardino County.
Senate Defeats Resolution to Rein in EPA
The Senate defeated Senator Rand Paul’s resolution of disapproval of the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) on Thursday, November 10. The vote on S. J. Res. 27 was 41 to 56.
Under the Congressional Review Act, the resolution required only a simple majority. Forty-one votes was a disappointing result. It can largely be blamed on four senators, who introduced two competing bills to delay rather than block the rule. S. 1833 was introduced by Senators Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.). S. 1815 was introduced by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.).
These bills allowed several Senators to vote against the resolution, while claiming that they support doing something. Since neither of these bills has any chance of getting the sixty votes necessary, this claim is entirely hypocritical.
The odd thing is that the four senators introducing these two bills represent states covered by the CSAPR, which may do serious economic damage to their economies. Perhaps they don’t care.
According to a recent report by economics consulting firm EMSI, nine of the top eleven fast-growing jobs in the nation are in the oil and gas sector. The cause of the job growth is high demand for hydrocarbon energy and also technological breakthroughs in drilling (primarily hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking”).
For President Obama, approving the Keystone XL Pipeline should have been a no-brainer. All the State Department had to do was conclude the obvious — the pipeline is in the U.S. national interest.
What other reasonable conclusion is possible? Building the 1,700-mile, shovel-ready project would create thousands of construction jobs, stimulate tens of billions of dollars in business spending, and generate billions of dollars in tax revenues. Once operational, the pipeline would enhance U.S. energy security, displacing oil imported from unsavory regimes with up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from friendly, stable, environmentally fastidious, democratic Canada. Canada already ships us more oil than all Persian Gulf states combined, and Keystone would significantly expand our self-reliance on North American energy.
Obama had only two policy choices. He could either disapprove the pipeline on the grounds that environmental concerns over incremental greenhouse gas emissions and oil spill risk outweigh the substantial economic, fiscal, and energy security benefits of the pipeline. Or he could approve the pipeline on the grounds that its benefits outweigh potential environmental impacts.
On October 19th, a handful of American solar panel manufacturers petitioned the Commerce Department asking for the imposition of trade tariffs on their competitors in China. In response to this petition, the Commerce Department on Wednesday agreed to investigate whether China’s trade practices in the solar sector violate international law.
There are many stupid environmentalist talking points, but the stupidest is that the Chinese government is undercutting the growth of America’s solar power manufacturing industry. According to this line of reasoning, generous state subsidies allow Chinese solar panel manufacturers to dump their products onto the American market at artificially low prices.
This blog has kept a close eye on the Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive expansion of its own authority (see here and here). The latest such power grab is taking place in the western United States, where the EPA is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. These Franken-regs are being used to trump the states’ rightful authority on visibility-improvement policy and impose billions of dollars of emissions controls for benefits that are literally invisible.
In 1977 and 1990, Congress passed amendments to the Clean Air Act providing that states work together to improve visibility at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. Together, these amendments are known as the Regional Haze provision. Notably, this provision accords states a uniquely high degree of control relative to the EPA. According to the EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze implementation guidelines, “[T]he [Clean Air] Act and legislative history indicate that Congress evinced a special concern with insuring that States would be the decision-makers” on visibility-improvement policy making. The courts, too, have interpreted the Clean Air Act such that states have primacy on Regional Haze decision making. In the seminal case American Corn Growers v. EPA (2001), which set boundaries between the states and the EPA on Regional Haze policy, the D.C. Circuit Court remanded the EPA’s 1999 Regional Haze implementation guidelines for encroaching on states’ authority.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute gets a disapproving nod from Naomi Klein in her latest essay for The Nation:
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
(Before we go any further, Horner addressed this FOIA complaint earlier this week, after Lisa Jackson suggested that those engaged in asking for taxpayer funded communications that they are entitled to under the law were “criminal.” )
She’s going to call us on this — right? She doesn’t want to end capitalism as we know it, she just wants a large carbon tax so we can dot our landscape with windmills in the next few decades and ride off into the sunset on our new carbon-free ponies. Well, no, she’s going to largely confirm that she believes unfettered capitalism is going to destroy the world, and we need to reorganize society around localized organic farming or community co-ops or something: [click to continue…]
Paul Krugman’s recent article in the NY Times is a weak attempt to convince those who have been led astray by our “fossilized political system” that solar power is somehow becoming a rising star of reliability since, as he claims, it is now “cost-effective.” This pipedream is of course followed by a casual alarmist condemnation of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). It seems Krugman has gotten a little too solar-happy based on his overt distortion of both solar and fracking facts.
First, let’s get the sun out of our eyes and the buzzing Krugman out of our ears so the reality of solar energy can come into focus. Holman W. Jenkins’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal shatters Krugman’s application of solar energy under “Moore’s Law,” explaining the real reasons behind the decrease in solar energy price, which Krugman claims was actually the “technological success” of Solyndra’s failure. In Jenkins’s piece, he uses a fictitious acceptance letter from Herbert M. Allison, a former chief financial officer of Merrill Lynch, recruited by the White House to counsel on the Department of Energy’s “green” loan program, who was recruited after the collapse of Solyndra. He states:
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