Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced on Thursday that the federal government would release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to counteract supply disruptions in the global oil market. In addition, the other member nations of the International Energy Agency would release another thirty million barrels.
Thirty million barrels is the largest single release in the history of the SPR, but is insignificant compared to total global daily consumption of roughly 80 million barrels. The Washington Post noted in an editorial on Friday that the crisis the Obama Administration is trying to deal with is that “President Obama’s re-election prospects will be harmed if national discontent over high gasoline prices continues. The oil release could be seen as a way for the president to take credit for gas prices that are falling anyway….”
Rory Cooper at the Heritage Foundation’s Foundry discusses what a stupid idea this is and how it fits in with all of President Obama’s other phony, counter-productive energy policies. Instead of tapping the SPR, why doesn’t the President announce that the federal government is opening federal lands and offshore areas to new oil and gas exploration? That would increase global oil production and lower gasoline prices now and over the long term. The reason is because President Obama and his Administration favor much higher gas prices. The SPR release simply helps delay implementation of his policies until after the 2012 election.
This post updates my June 14 post on the mantra intoned by EPA, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that EPA/CARB’s greenhouse gas (GHG) motor vehicle emission standards are “harmonized and consistent” with NHTSA’s fuel economy standards.
EPA Associate Administrator David McIntosh recently sent written responses to questions from House Energy and Commerce Committee members following up on a May 5, 2011 hearing entitled “The American Energy Initiative.”
In a nutshell, EPA defines “harmonized and consistent” as “whatever we say it is.” [click to continue…]
[N.B. Ex-Vice President and massive carbon “polluter” Al Gore took to the pages of this week’s Rolling Stone in order to critique President Barack Obama’s supposedly timid response to global warming. This is Part 1 of a multipart series on the policy distortions peddled by Mr. Gore in the piece.]
Regarding the influence of “bribes” on climate policy, Mr. Gore wrote in Rolling Stone,
“…Polluters and Ideologues are trampling all over the “rules” of democratic discourse…buying elected officials wholesale with bribes…”
Clearly, Mr. Gore hasn’t been following the Congressional politics of climate change policy. Because if he had been paying attention, he’d know that the only people “buying elected officials wholesale” are the very people who are trying to enact his preferred climate policy, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme.
[click to continue…]
I’ve previously reported (see here and here) on the environmental industry’s movement’s war on bunker fuel, the heavy fuel used by large ships around the world. The modus operandi of the enviros is to pursue and convince regulators, such as the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) or California’s Air Resources Board (CARB), to push for a targeted patchwork of prohibitions and/or mandating low-sulfur fuel-switching, enacting stricter speed limits in near-shore shipping lanes, restricting on-ship power generation when in port, and imposing emissions taxes.
A couple of years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was toying with the idea of calling for strict and extremely costly regulations or a federal ban on bunker fuel -carrying or -using ships within U.S. waters, only to be shouted down by politicians and citizens from states with large maritime sectors. But California, a state not known to back down from adopting stupid environmental regulations, moved forward in the war on bunker fuel and international trade and set its own regulations on fuel use and petroleum conveyance in the maritime industry operating within the state’s waters.
[click to continue…]
We recently posted about the EPA’s decision to reduce the cellulosic ethanol blending requirement from 500 million gallons in 2012 to somewhere between 3.45-12.9 million gallons, which is 0.69- 2.5 percent of the original “mandate.”
Via Greenwire ($ubscription required), we see that refiners are still required to purchase “credits” from EPA indicating that they are complying with the mandate, despite its impossibility:
The proposal fine-tunes blending mandates for 2012 called for by the federal renewable fuel standard, and EPA said yesterday it expects to require a total use of between 3.45 million and 12.9 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels next year. Officials said the final figure could come out to more or less than the 6.6 million gallons required in 2011.
Charles Drevna, president of NPRA, said given that EPA’s own data show the ethanol industry has produced no qualifying fuel in the past year, the requirement for blenders to either use the fuel or pay EPA about $1 per gallon for a credit makes no sense. [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…]
Under attack from almost everyone these days, the ethanol industry has been digging deep to find ways of convincing America that they really are the best. They’ve been running advertisements everywhere claiming that ethanol (and presumably, federal ethanol policies) have helped to keep the price of gasoline up to $0.89 per gallon cheaper in 2010. They commissioned a report from the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development at Iowa State University. The report itself merely updates similar research from past years, the original study can be found here. The abstract (of the 2010 report):
This report updates the findings in Du and Hayes 2009 by extending the data to December 2010 and concludes that over the sample period from January 2000 to December 2010, the growth in ethanol production reduced wholesale gasoline prices by $0.25 per gallon on average. The Midwest region experienced the biggest impact, with a $0.39/gallon reduction, while the East Coast had the smallest impact at $0.16/gallon. Based on the data of 2010 only, the marginal impacts on gasoline prices are found to be substantially higher given the much higher ethanol production and crude oil prices. The average effect increases to $0.89/gallon and the regional impact ranges from $0.58/gallon in the East Coast to $1.37/gallon in the Midwest. In addition, we report on a related analysis that asks what would happen to US gasoline prices if ethanol production came to an immediate halt. Under a very wide range of parameters, the estimated gasoline price increase would be of historic proportions, ranging from 41% to 92%.
[click to continue…]
The House Will Vote To Bring back the Bulb
Henry Payne, The Michigan View, 22 June 2011
Supremes Retreat from Climate Panic
Steve Milloy, The Washington Times, 22 June 2011
Capability, Not Politics, Should Drive DOD Energy Reseach
Jack Spencer, Heritage Web Memo, 22 June 2011
China’s Growing Energy Consumption
Greg Pollowitz, Planet Gore, 22 June 2011
What’s All the Fracking Fuss about?
Larry Bell, Forbes, 21 June 2011
Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on carbon dioxide provided some welcome relief to those concerned that the Court might say something, deliberately or otherwise, that would buttress the claims of global warming alarmists. The Court said no such thing. In fact, it seemed to step back from the suggestions in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA ruling that the scientific debate over anthropogenic warming had largely been settled. Yesterday’s ruling does mention hurricanes and heat-related deaths and melting ice-caps, but only in characterizing EPA’s view of global warming, not the Court’s. And the Court quickly distances itself from EPA’s views with an interesting footnote:
“For views opposing EPA’s, see, e.g., Dawidoff, The Civil Heretic, N. Y. Times Magazine 32 (March 29, 2009). The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.”
[click to continue…]
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org