Over at the PJ Tattler today, my colleague Chris Horner receives warmly the news that the President might make the administration’s record on renewable energy a focus of his State of the Union Address:
With the political fallout from President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline putting heat on the administration, Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler appears to be trying to pin the blame on …. Republicans.
Yes, as absurd as that may sound, Beutler claims that, “House Republicans made a conscious choice to undercut the Keystone XL oil pipeline project” because they refused the let the White House delay the project for nothing other than political gain.
Recall that the Obama administration planned to make a formal decision on the pipeline a year from now. A great deal of reporting and inference suggested that the administration supported the project in principle, but chose to delay the decision for several months for further study, largely to avoid picking an election year fight with environmental advocates. Instead Republicans forced his hand, and, with the review incomplete, he had to formally reject the proposal. [Emphasis added]
Why shouldn’t House Republicans “force” Obama’s hand, as Beutler would say, given how long the project has taken already—and given the fact that Obama’s motivation to delay is purely political? Essentially, Beutler is criticizing GOP House members for not letting Obama roll right over them. As Conn Carroll points out in the Washington Examiner today, notes that criticism of Obama’s decision has been widespread, including among the nation’s major newspaper editorial boards.
Last week I spoke with an editorialist at the Orange County Register, about the silliness that is the California Energy Commission’s latest efficiency mandate, for battery chargers. On Saturday, the paper ran an editorial about our conversation. The entire editorial, “Bureaucrats Eyeing Your Device Chargers,” is reprinted below. Afterwards, I have two extra thoughts on energy efficiency policy.
It’s enough to make the Energizer Bunny pound his drum in protest. This month the California Energy Commission imposed new regulations – the Appliance Efficiency Standards for Battery Chargers. According to the CEC’s website, “The purpose of this rulemaking is to adopt efficiency standards, certification and marking requirements for large and small battery charger systems.”
News You Can Use
Hedge Fund Wins Big Bet against Solar
In a quarterly newsletter, the hedge fund Greenlight Capital, Inc. announced that it has closed its short position in First Solar, “one of the most profitable shorts in the history” of its funds. Stock prices for First Solar, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan from the same program that propped up Solyndra, plummeted primarily because Germany rolled back solar power subsidies.
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Obama Punts on Keystone (again)
President Barack Obama on Wednesday, 18th January, announced that he would not approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in the Gulf States. A provision in the payroll tax cut extension legislation required the President to make a decision before 21st February based on the national interest. The President’s statement used the deadline to blame Congress for his decision:
“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people.”
The New York Times was almost alone among major papers in supporting the President’s decision. The Washington Post noted that the President’s own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness had reported the day before that the United States needed to be building more energy infrastructure, including pipelines. Post columnist Robert Samuelson wrote that Obama’s decision was an “act of national insanity.”
There is general feeling in air that the American Dream is a thing of the past, unattainable due to an economy riddled with stagnation and strangling regulations. Environmentalists have striven to produce this nightmare in their relentless aim to handicap all industrial progress in this country that might have any element of risk to a “clean” environmental way of life. They want you to give up the dream. I am here to share with you that the story of America as the Land of Opportunity is still alive, but is at stake.
Shiver Me Timbers! World Not Burning Up After All
Matt Patterson, GlobalWarming.org, 20 January 2012
Narrow Interest Blocks Big Pipeline
David Kreutzer, The Foundry, 20 January 2012
Romney: Hot and Cold on Global Warming
Deroy Murdock, National Review, 20 January 2012
Environmentalism and the Leisure Class
William Tucker, American Spectator, 20 January 2012
Global Lukewarming
Chip Knappenberger, Master Resource, 19 January 2012
Dismal Outlook for EVs on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Paul Chesser, National Legal and Policy Center, 19 January 2012
Obama’s Keystone Punt: Pure Politics
Kenneth Green, Planet Gore, 18 January 2012
Competition, Not Handouts, Should Determine Role of Green Energy
Nicolas Loris, U.S. News and World Report, 18 January 2012
Oregon Legislature Will Consider Regulating Mercury in CFLs
Scott Learn, Oregonian, 18 January 2012
Fuel Economy Standards Will Fuel Race to Bigger Cars
Paul Mulshine, Star-Ledger, 17 January 2012
What is fast-becoming the main talking point against the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline is the claim that greater access to Canadian crude oil would not enhance U.S. energy security.
According to pipeline opponents, most of the petroleum products made from Keystone crude would be exported by Gulf Coast refiners to Europe, South America, and Asia rather than sold in U.S. domestic markets. Thus, opponents contend, Canadian oil coming through the pipeline would displace little if any oil imported from unstable, undemocratic, or unfriendly countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) made a media splash with this talking point at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last month. Keystone, he said, would not “back out” any oil we import from the Middle East if it simply turns the USA into a “middle man” for exporting diesel fuel and other finished petroleum products made with Canadian crude. He noted that nothing in TransCanada company’s long-term sales contracts with Gulf Coast refiners ensures that products made from Canadian crude would be sold to U.S. consumers.
Markey challenged TransCanada exec Alex Pourbaix to support legislation prohibiting Gulf Coast refiners from exporting petroleum products refined from Keystone crude. Clever! Pourbaix could not support Markey’s proposal without jeopardizing the sales contracts on which the pipeline project’s commercial viability depends. Yet he could not reject Markey’s proposal without appearing to confirm that Keystone is a plot by TransCanada and Gulf Coast refiners to export more oil overseas. Pourbaix did reject Markey’s proposal, but without explaining why an export ban would be a mischievous ‘solution’ to a non-existent problem. [click to continue…]
Professional environmentalists are cheering President Obama’s rejection of construction permits for the KeystoneXL Pipeline. They are the only ones cheering, aside from a few NIMBY groups and The New York Times Obama’s always-loyal damage control cohorts. Even The Washington Post voted against Obama in this struggle. The pipeline was a small, but important part of our energy infrastructure and none of the arguments put forth against construction of the KeystoneXL Pipeline are convincing.
1. An initial argument claims that the KeystoneXL Pipeline will somehow not provide energy security for the United States.
Because consumers from around the country (and the world) use oil, pipelines are necessary to transfer mind-bogglingly large amounts of it around the country each day. Imagine a scenario where we randomly begin shutting down oil and natural gas pipelines around the United States. The obvious result of decreasing our capacity would be decreased security, as we are less capable of moving oil around our country to deal with shocks, disasters, etc. Now think about what adding a pipeline does: it increases our capacity to transport oil around the country. Ultimately, this must increase to some extent our energy security. [click to continue…]
The Environmental Protection Agency’s words and deeds are far apart when it comes to hydraulic fracturing, the technolution in natural gas drilling that has roughly doubled economically obtainable reserves of U.S. gas in only the last decade.
Last evening, Energy and Environment News PM (subscription required) reported that, “U.S. EPA wants to boost the public’s confidence in natural gas so production levels continue to rise, an agency official said today at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.”
Last month in Pavilion, Wyoming, however, EPA imparted the opposite. Far from “boosting the public’s confidence” in hydraulic fracturing (which now is virtually synonymous with the American gas industry), EPA perpetrated shoddy science in an effort to undercut the drilling technique’s public image.
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