Blog

Good news and bad news for drivers from federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The good news is:

LaHood said he firmly opposes raising the federal gasoline tax in the current recession.

The bad news is that, because people are using less gas as they switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles and just plain drive less, LaHood is thinking of taxing us according to how many miles we drive – a VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) Tax. Now in some ways, this is a more equitable taxation scheme to fund road maintenance than the gas tax – it’s more reflective of the amount you use the road – and is therefore less objectionable, especially if it replaces rather than supplements the gas tax. However, it comes with a host of ramifications.

Most seriously, it will entail government surveillance of our driving habits. So there are obvious civil liberty concerns. Older Britons – and not so old – will remember the government asking them, “Is your journey really necessary?” This will give the government the chance to ask that question more directly.

More generally, the tax may be self-defeating. It will serve as a disincentive to drive, thereby reducing the amount it raises. For those who have to drive long distances, because they have a long commute or because their job requires it in other ways, it will also serve as a burden on economic activity (although perhaps no more than the current gas tax). Environmentalists may worry that it will reduce the incentive to switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles. While this would probably be a good thing in terms of road safety, environmentalists are not ones to let 2000 deaths a year get in the way of their war on oil, so my betting is that the VMT tax will, in fact, supplement a gas tax, putting your journey in double jeopardy.

Finally, if the Secretary is so opposed to a gas tax, what does he think of cap-and-trade of greenhouse gas emissions, which will be functionally equivalent to a gas tax? That’s administration policy. So it looks like the Secretary is actually in favor of a gas tax, as long as we don’t call it that.

UPDATE: I meant to include a few words about an even better idea. The redoubtable Jerry Taylor has instead done it for me at The Corner: T

hat said, there is an even better reform — get rid of federal gasoline taxes altogether and send all road construction and maintenance programs back to the states. All the bridges to nowhere, all the Robert Byrd memorial thises and thats, all the corruption associated with log-rolling transportation earmarks in Congress . . . all goes away. Alas, not even the late, great President George W. Bush dared entertain such an idea, and with all roads to recovery thought to come out of some shovel-ready highway somewhere, LaHood most certainly won’t go there.

Earlier this week, in a letter to Sierra Club climate council David Bookbinder, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the Agency would reconsider, via a notice-and-comment rulemaking, a Bush-EPA memorandum interpreting regulations that determine whether carbon dioxide (CO₂) is currently subject to emission controls under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program.

The memorandum, issued on December 18, 2008 by Jackson’s predecessor, Stephen Johnson, responds to EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) decision in a dispute between EPA Region 8 and the Sierra Club. Region 8 granted Deseret Electric Power Cooperative a PSD permit to build a new coal electric generating unit near Bonanza, Utah. Like all other PSD permits issued in the program’s history, this one did not require the regulated entity to install best available control technology (BACT) to limit CO₂ emissions. Sierra Club argued that EPA regulations adopted in 1993, which require power producers to monitor and report CO₂ emissions, make CO₂ a regulated pollutant for PSD purposes. Region 8 countered that it has no power to apply PSD or BACT to CO₂, because EPA has consistently interpreted “subject to regulation” to mean subject to emission controls. The 1993 rules require data collection and reporting, not emissions control.

The EAB disagreed with Sierra Club in part, and with Region 8 in part. Contrary to Sierra Club, “subject to regulation” does not have an unambiguous meaning that compels EPA to impose a CO2 BACT standard in a PSD permit. But, contrary to Region 8, EPA is not bound by the Agency’s historic interpretation to apply PSD only to pollutants for which EPA currently administers emission controls. The EAB asked EPA to clarify the meaning of “subject to regulation” in the context of an action of “nationwide scope.” That’s what Johnson did in his December 18, 2008 memorandum.

The reason this is important, even if you don’t live in Bonanza, Utah, is that applying PSD to CO₂ could have a chilling effect on new construction and economic development throughout the nation. As explained here, here, and here, the cutoff for regulating business entities as “major stationary sources” under the PSD program is a potential to emit 250 tons per year (TPY) of a CAA-regulated air pollutant. An estimated 1.2 million previously unregulated buildings and facilities actually emit 250 TPY of CO₂. All would be vulnerable to new controls, paperwork, and penalties if courts deem CO₂ “subject to regulation” under the CAA.

Before any firm could build or modify, for example, a large commercial office building, enclosed mall, or big box store, it would have to obtain a PSD permit, which means it would have to undertake a complex investigation of how to comply with BACT (see pp. B6-9 of EPA’s New Source Review Workshop Manual). Even apart from any technology investments required for BACT compliance, the PSD permitting process is costly and time-consuming. In 2007, each PSD permit on average cost $125,120 and 866 burden hours to obtain.

EPA’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) estimates that even a ten-fold increase in PSD permitting from 200-300 permits per year to 2,000-3,000 permits “could overwhelm permitting authorities” and subject firms to “new costs, uncertainty, and delay in obtaining their permits to construct.” Yet if firms seek to modify just 1% of the 1.2 million entities that currently emit 250 TPY of CO₂, EPA and its state counterparts would have to process 12,000 PSD permits per year. The costs, delays, and uncertainties produced by this administrative quagmire would bring economic development to a halt.

Johnson’s memorandum makes a strong case for the lawfulness of EPA’s historic interpretation that PSD and BACT are triggered only by emission control requirements established under other provisions, not by monitoring and reporting regulations. I find particularly impressive Johnson’s argument that Sierra Club’s reading of the Act would make nonsense of CAA §114, which authorizes the Administrator to require entities to gather and report emissions data to inform policy development. If EPA took the position that monitoring and reporting regulations automatically trigger PSD and BACT, then “the mere act of gathering the information would essentially dictate the result of the decision that the information is being gathered to inform (whether or not to require control of a pollutant).” Johnson remarks: “I prefer an interpretation that allows the Agency to first assess whether there is a justification for controlling emissions of a particular pollutant under relevant criteria in the Act.”

Attorney Peter Glaser put the point more forcefully in an amicus brief on behalf CEI and 13 other free-market groups. In the Deseret case, Sierra Club wanted the EAB to mandate CO₂ regulation under PSD and BACT even though the EPA Administrator had not determined (and still has not determined) whether CO₂ emissions endanger public health or welfare. This regulate first, do the analysis later (if ever) approach would stand the logic of the CAA on its head.

Johnson’s memorandum accomplished two things. First, it averted a “PSD nightmare”—at least on his watch. Second, as an Aiken Gump analysis astutely observed, the only way Johnson’s successor could overturn his “interpretative rule” would be through a notice and comment rulemaking. Jackson’s decision to reconsider Johnson’s memorandum via a rulemaking seems to confirm that assessment.

Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and Natural Resources Defense Council sued EPA last month in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, asking the court to overturn Johnson’s memo. But, as Greenwire reported on February 17, when the deadline came, the groups declined to file a motion to “stay” the memo, or put it on hold. Greenwire explains: “If the agency were to stay the memo immediately, Bookbinder said, it could trigger an obligation under the Clean Air Act for broad-ranging regulations targeting even very small sources of carbon dioxide emissions.”

Bookbinder commented: “The Clean Air Act has language in there that is kind of all or nothing if CO2 gets regulated, and it could be unbelievably complicated and administratively nightmarish for both EPA and the states if they were to yank the Johnson memo and not have something in place that makes it clear that we’re going after only the very large sources.”

This is quite remarkable. At a September 23, 2008 hearing before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee (see segments 1:47:10-1:48:22 and 2:03:83-2:05:20 of the Committee’s Archive Webcast), Bookbinder derided as a “bugaboo,” “red herring,” and “pure scare tactic” warnings by industry and free-market groups that establishing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles under CAA §202 would expose tens of thousands of previously unregulated stationary sources to PSD and BACT regulation. Yet now he acknowledges that, if applied to CO₂, the PSD program could morph into an “unbelievably complicated and nightmarish” affair.

To be sure, Bookbinder thinks it’s possible for EPA, in a rulemaking, to make “clear we’re going after only very large sources.” But as a matter of law, EPA has no authority to pretend that a statutory cutoff set at 250 TPY really means 10,000 TPY, 25,000 TPY, or 100,000 TPY. Furthermore, although neither the Sierra Club nor any other major environmental group would sue EPA to insist on a strict letter-of-the-law application of PSD to CO₂, the major environmental groups do not have a monopoly on CAA litigation. Applying PSD to small CO₂ sources would empower legions of NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) activists to block or delay construction of strip malls, big box stores, fast food restaurants, or other development they deem undesirable.

Lisa Jackson needs to understand that she cannot rescind Johnson’s interpretation and make CO₂ a pollutant “subject to regulation” under PSD without running the very serious risk of turning the Clean Air Act into a gigantic de-stimulus package.

I have been a steak snob ever since I apprenticed under a master butcher in Ojai Valley, California a few years back. Indeed, I’m the kind of guy who orders his steak so rare that the people dining at the table next to me get uncomfortable.

So it is with rising dread that I witness the greenies’ assault on the beef industry. Enviro-types have long hated cattlemen for treating cows like animals, but recently, they’ve found a new motive to attack providers of delicious red meat: climate change.

According to the latest in the “It’s easy being green” series run by the Center for American Progress, “it’s worth taking a closer look” at beef production, for “the planet’s sake,” because industrial scale livestock farming has a big carbon footprint. The piece references a 2006 study that compares “a Toyota Prius, which uses about one fourth as much as fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV, to a plant-based diet, which uses roughly one-fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat.”

How about a steak tax, America? After all, the greens put gas-guzzling SUV’s (God bless ‘em) in their cross-hairs, and came out on top-they forced through new fuel efficiency regulations that have saddled an ailing Detroit with a $100 billion burden. Can the cattleman be far behind?

Taken from CCNet, a scholarly electronic network edited by Benny Peiser. Every day Peiser sends out the latest news on the science, economics and politics of global warming. To subscribe, and I recommend that you do, send an e-mail to listserver@ljmu.ac.uk (“subscribe cambridge-conference”).

Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, the nation is becalmed, a painted ship on a painted ocean and we have gone back a century, hewing the same coal that first put Britain on the fast track to the Industrial Revolution. The reason why we are still stuffing black lumps of carbon into furnaces is simple: it makes economic sense and the financial markets are shouting this message louder than ever before.

–Carl Mortished, The Times, 18 February 2009

Italian police on Tuesday arrested mobsters, businessmen and local politicians who allegedly used corrupt practices and bribes to gain control of a project to build wind farms in Sicily. Police in Trapani said the local Mafia bribed city officials in nearby Mazara del Vallo so the town would invest in wind farms to produce energy.

—Associated Press, 17 February 2009

THE collapse in the international price of carbon is threatening the Federal Government’s ability to pay for compensation packages in the emissions trading scheme without drawing on the budget. Compensation for households, trade-exposed industries and high-polluting coal-fired electricity generators was expected to be drawn from auctioning carbon credits, which the Government estimated would initially generate $12 billion a year. But the assumed price of carbon – $25 a tonne – is now under threat because the Government’s proposal allows polluting businesses to offset an unlimited proportion of emissions by buying international credits.

–Tom Arup, The Age, 18 February 2009

AUSTRALIA’S second-biggest steelmaker says the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme is likely to cause job losses and force new investments offshore. “We understand the Government’s intentions, but the practical effect of the scheme as it stands is that we will bear a cost not borne by our competitors,” he said. “We would be the only steelmakers in the world to have these costs and that would put us at a material disadvantage.”

–Lenore Taylor, The Australian, 18 February 2009

As more and more discoveries are made about global warming, scientists and political organisations have been clamouring for stronger and more immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Amid this rising call for action, there has been surprisingly little attention given to recent work suggesting that future peak carbon dioxide levels may have been overestimated by a factor of four to five.

–Thomas Crowley, The Guardian, 17 February 2009

For years, CEI has been warning that industrial suppliers and users of energy only support cap-and-trade climate policies because they think they can manipulate these schemes to their benefit and to their competitors’ detriment. CEI President Fred Smith persuasively made this argument before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works in February, 2007. Last Tuesday, I made a similar argument on a panel debating government subsidies for green jobs.

Thankfully, it seems the message is finally catching on. To wit, read today’s great column by Tom Borelli, in the DC Examiner. Here’s a taste:

“Failing companies such as AIG, General Electric and General Motors, already propped up with tax dollars, have partnered with radical environmentalists in a scheme their CEOs believe will allow them to profit on fears about global warming.

Corporate members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of over 30 businesses and environmental groups urging federal regulation to combat global warming, hope to make money through a government-mandated reduction in greenhouse.

Emissions such as carbon dioxide would be capped, and companies using more emissions than allotted by the government must purchase credits from other businesses.

USCAP and its cap-and-trade agenda were the focus of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on January 15 – the committee’s first since the more radical Rep.Henry Waxman, D-CA, ousted longtime chairman, Rep. John Dingell, D-MI.

Companies hope to profit from selling their excess emissions credits to businesses with high carbon dioxide emissions, such as coal-based utilities.  Companies burdened with purchasing these credits will then pass the added costs to consumers.”

When is it OK for an oil slick to coat a pristine beach?

When it’s a “natural occurrence,” of course!

My boss stayed at a hotel in Santa Barbara, and on the bed stand of his room, a pamphlet read:

“Tar found along local beaches is the result of natural seeps in the ocean that leak oil and natural gas into the Santa Barbara Channel. Like the La Brea tar pits on land, natural cracks and faults caused by ancient earthquakes allow oil and gas to escape from the ocean floor. The seepage then floats to the surface where some evaporates, some degrades and the rest thickens into floating balls of sticky tar. Tides, currents and winds can wash the tar onshore.”

That’s not all!

To hammer home the naturalness of the oil slick that coats the hotel’s beachfront, the pamphlet further noted that, “The Chumash Native Americans put tar seepage to work 5,000 years ago. Besides waterproofing baskets and bowls, they used a mixture of tar and pine to seal their canoes.”

So Captain Hazelwood did the Eskimos a service by providing them with plenty of sealant, right?

That was a cheap joke, but there is an actual policy point here.

If you can’t distinguish between a “natural” oil slick and an anthropogenic oil slick, and you think that all oil slicks are bad, then you’d want to do something about it. Well, it so happens that there is an easy fix for these “natural” oil slicks: drilling. By removing the oil, it can’t seep out and coat beautiful beaches.

So let’s drill, baby, drill! (for nature, that is)

As unusual as it has been for global warming alarmists to debate skeptics, I have found it even more rare to find a mainstream news outlet — anywhere — to cover the issue surrounding states’ global warming commissions and the Center for Climate Strategies. Well, after traveling all the way to Anchorage a few weeks ago, I finally found a local TV station who was interested in hearing about it: ABC’s affiliate, which broadcasts throughout Alaska.

It turned out that I was there (when the station did a report about my concerns) on the day before the Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet, as it’s called up there, was to meet. So after hearing what I had to say, reporter Bob Mallory checked out the meeting to see what CCS and panel members had to say. From his report, where he said a carbon tax was under consideration:

Mallory: As far as scientific debate as to whether global warming is occurring, that’s something that won’t be happening in these meetings.

CCS facilitator Gloria Flora: I think when you look at Gov. Palin’s executive order, and (Alaska Dept. of Environmental Conservation) Commissioner (Larry) Hartig has made it very clear, that we’re not here to debate who did what when, where are these emissions coming from…we know that there is far more carbon and CO2 in the atmosphere.

In a further on-air discussion with anchor Ty Hardt, Mallory explains how the state’s contract with CCS (as is the case in every state) forbids any discussion or debate about the science of global warming. And in the written version of the report for the station’s Web site, Flora makes this amazing statement:

ABC Alaska News asked Flora, what if the science behind climate change is wrong? Her response: “So what? We’ve saved money. We’ve saved resources. We’ve improved our health. We’ve improved the environment. So, if we’re wrong, hallelujah! You know, we just did a lot of really good things.”

To give you a flavor of the Grape Nuts that CCS is hiring to run their state climate commission meetings, YouTube has a short clip of Flora in full-alarmism.

I had intended to return to this point when I originally posted about this debate last week, but time got away from me. Thankfully, my colleague Roy Cordato brought it up today:

During the question and answer session of last week’s William Schlesinger/John Christy global warming debate, (alarmist) Schlesinger was asked how many members of United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were actual climate scientists. It is well known that many, if not most, of its members are not scientists at all. Its president, for example, is an economist. This question came after Schlesinger had cited the IPCC as an authority for his position. His answer was quite telling. First he broadened it to include not just climate scientists but also those who have had “some dealing with the climate.” His complete answer was that he thought, “something on the order of 20 percent have had some dealing with climate.” In other words, even IPCC worshiper Schlesinger now acknowledges that 80 percent of the IPCC membership had absolutely no dealing with the climate as part of their academic studies.

This shatters so much of the alarmists’ claim, as they almost always appeal to the IPCC as their ultimate authority. Slain.