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Call it the election-day dog that didn’t bark – or maybe the oiled bird that didn’t fly – the BP oil spill had virtually no impact at the polls on November 2nd.   The fact that the biggest ecological scare of the summer was nearly forgotten by fall says a lot about where the American people stand on energy and environmental issues.

Less than five months after President Obama gave a primetime address hyping the Deepwater Horizon spill as “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” there is scant evidence that even a single Congressional race was affected by it.  This was not for lack of trying.  In the first few months after the April 20th spill, many Congressional Democrats joined environmental activists and some in the media in blaming pro-drilling Republicans for their complicity in the so-called Gulf disaster. 

For a while, it was fashionable to ridicule those who had chanted “drill baby drill” during the 2008 race.   Opponents of domestic drilling thought they had a defining issue heading into the midterms.

But rather than having to eat their words and go home in defeat, the “drill baby drill” crowd is back – and they’ll be returning to Washington with quite a few new allies. 

Ironically, it was not the spill itself but Obama’s overreaction to it in the form of a job-killing moratorium on offshore drilling that really angered voters in Louisiana and other impacted states.  The only reason the Obamatorium didn’t hurt Democratic candidates there was that they were just as vocal as Republicans in their opposition to it.

 So what does all of this say about voters?  For one thing, it shows that they are getting wise to environmentalist alarmism and exaggeration.   Just as the drumbeat of doom and gloom predictions about global warming didn’t generate public support for cap and trade, neither did the equally-overblown claims of spill–induced ecological devastation create a backlash against offshore drilling.     And, given the still-struggling economy and stubbornly-high unemployment, the electorate is not going to accept costly solutions to overstated threats.   The drilling ban, like cap and trade, would have raised energy costs and destroyed jobs.  As such, it is a nonstarter with the American people and their newly-elected representatives.  

 But has the Obama administration gotten the message?  Not yet.  While admitting that cap and trade legislation is dead, the President coyly describes it as “just one way of skinning the cat,” and added that “I am going to be looking for other means to address this problem,” including EPA regulations that seek to achieve the same ends.   Similarly, the President announced with great fanfare – shortly before the elections – that he is lifting the drilling moratorium.   But this policy change has thus far made no difference as the administration continues to bottle up all new drilling with regulatory red tape and indefinite delays.   

In other words, the same energy and environmental policies that the public rejected when the administration and Congress tried to push them through the front door will be making a return via the back door.   The incoming Congress has been elected to stop this from happening.

Today at MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy blog, I offer comentary on the Obama Administration’s proposed rule to establish first-ever greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and fuel economy standards for semi-trucks and other “heavy duty” (HD) motor vehicles.

Although the rule’s ostensible purpose is to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and oil imports, about 93% of the claimed net benefits have nothing to do with either climate change or energy security. Supposedly, truckers will make out like bandits by adopting fuel-saving technologies they would already have purchased if they were as smart as the bureaucrats at EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Sound familiar? Just as cap-and-trade proponents tried to sell their stealth energy tax as a “green jobs” program when they couldn’t sell it as climate protection, so EPA and NHTSA now try to sell their save-the-planet-beyond-petroleum regulations as a fuel-savings bonanza for owners of big rigs, dump trucks, buses, pickups, and vans.

EPA and  NHTSA offer five possible explanations of why truckers “under-invest” in fuel-saving technology even though fuel is a major operating expense, the industry is competitive, and profit margins are often thin. As discussed in my MR column, the agencies provide no solid evidence of “market failure.” Indeed, two of their “potential hypotheses” suggest that truckers are just behaving like prudent buyers, waiting to see whether the technologies perform as advertized and don’t adversely affect truck reliability and maintenance costs.

So what’s really fueling the rule? Well, partly it’s the fuel-economy fetish that Congress has enacted into law, most recently via the misnamed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which requires NHTSA to establish fuel-economy standards for HD vehicles.

Not to be underestimated, though, is the agencies’ organizational interest in expanding their bureaucratic empires. The joint rule will give EPA and NHTSA new control powers over vehicle manufacturers and the freight goods industry. Although the rule targets vehicles manufactured during model years 2014-2018, the agencies look forward to administering, and tightening, GHG/fuel-economy standards for HD vehicles from now through 2050.

What policy changes should free-marketeers advocate given the big shakeup that has just occurred in the composition and leadership of Congress?

In addition to overturning EPA’s Endangerment Rule, which would put the kibosh on all EPA global warming regulations, the 111th Congress should make NHTSA’s HD fuel-economy standards voluntary. Let the agencies make their case that every dollar truckers invest in fuel economy will generate returns of 140%-420%. But then let the trial-and-error process of the marketplace decide whether what EPA and NHTSA are peddling is smart advice or hype.

Draw up a map of the U.S. and shade in the regions that rely on energy jobs – places like Appalachia, the Rockies, western Gulf states, Alaska – and that’s where we saw some of the strongest anti-Obama sentiment succeeding on election day.
With few exceptions, the only Democratic congressional candidates who won in these areas were those able to distance themselves from President Obama’s energy policies – or to be more accurate, his anti-energy policies. In its first two years, the Obama administration has tried to slam the door shut on domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas.
But now, many of the administration’s Congressional allies in this effort have gotten a pink slip from their constituents. Obama will soon have to contend with a Congress that sees increased supplies of affordable domestic energy – and the increased jobs that go with it – as things worth fighting for rather than against.
Most notably, costly global warming legislation proved to be political poison. Many Senate incumbents can only be grateful that the administration-endorsed cap-and-trade bill never came to a vote in the upper chamber, as the House-passed version was a major factor in defeating more than two dozen of its supporters. This includes longtime Democratic incumbent Rick Boucher whose rural Virginia district has a number of coal mines.
Voters throughout Appalachia correctly saw cap-and-trade as an energy tax designed to raise the cost of coal and other fossil fuels in order to drive them out of the marketplace. They didn’t like the implications for their electric bills, and they certainly didn’t like the implications for coal mining jobs. In addition to cap-and-trade, attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to deny new coal mine permits added to the voter outrage throughout coal country. And on top of concerns about coal mining jobs, voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that need affordable coal to maintain manufacturing jobs sent home incumbents who voted for cap-and-trade.
Cap-and-trade was every bit as unpopular in other energy producing regions, including the West where Rep. Harry Teague of New Mexico suffered the same fate as Boucher. The administration’s efforts to reduce oil and natural gas production on federal lands were also a factor. Obama’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar quickly earned a reputation as Secretary No on oil and gas drilling throughout the Rocky Mountain region, blocking many already-approved leases and issuing a record-low number of new ones. The region has the highest unemployment in the nation, and killing high-paying oil and gas industry jobs there was not well received on election day. Another November 2nd victim was Obama supporter John Salazar, incumbent Congressman from an energy-rich but job poor Colorado district – and Ken Salazar’s brother.
It is also worth noting that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hyped by President Obama in a nationwide address as “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” had little impact on the elections. If anything, it was the administration’s attempt to parlay the spill into a deepwater drilling moratorium that sparked anger amongst voters in the Gulf region. Obama’s overreach has already killed jobs in Louisiana and neighboring states. The only reason the moratorium did not play a bigger role in the elections there was that it was denounced by candidates of both parties.
The same is true in Alaska. Nowhere is the energy industry more important to a state economy than in Alaska. And there, the Obama administration has reached a dubious milestone – for the first time in decades, virtually all energy exploration activities in the state have come to a halt. As with Louisiana, the only reason energy wasn’t a bigger issue was that every major candidate had strongly disagreed with the administration and vowed to fight it on issues like opening portions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve and allowing exploration in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
In sum, just about every place in America where there is energy below the ground there were angry voters above it on November 2. The mandate is clear and now it is up to the incoming Congress to bring to Washington something that has been missing for the past two years – a policy that favors American energy production and jobs.