In December, EPA finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, one of the most expensive regulations, ever. The Agency says it would cost $10 billion per year; industry estimates are much higher.
In press releases, EPA claims that the rule is necessary in order to protect fetuses from developmental disorders engendered by mercury emissions. This is not true. In fact, EPA found that it is necessary and appropriate to regulate mercury emissions in order to protect a population that doesn’t exist: pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who annually consume more than 300 pounds of self-caught fish, from exclusively the 99th percentile most polluted freshwater inland water bodies.
The ridiculous Mercury and Air Toxics Rule is only a couple months old, but it’s already having a big impact. On January 26th, Ohio-based utility FirstEnergy Corps announced that it would shutter 6 coal fired power plants, and it cited the mercury rule as the primary reason. The company said 530 employees would be affected by the decision. Some will be relocated, but many will lose their livelihoods. Last week, the Associated Press reported that electricity prices in Ohio regions serviced by FirstEnergy are expected to double, due to the smaller supply of power engendered by EPA’s mercury regulation. In addition to job losses, the absurd mercury rule is raising electricity prices.
Today, FirstEnergy Corp. announced more plant closures caused by the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule. According to a press release issued this morning,
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Iain Murray and I today published an article in the American Spectator, which disputes many of President Obama’s State of the Union energy policy claims. As we wrote, “While the president spent more time on the topic than any other policy area, he distorted the facts, misrepresented his plans, and ignored his record.” It’s time to set the record straight:
Obama announced that “tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.” For those who favor energy production, this sounds great, but a close inspection reveals that this announcement was nothing new — the sale should have been scheduled last year, and the only reason the administration is planning it now is that it is required under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. In fact, he didn’t direct his administration to do anything new — he just recycled a plan actually released in November 2011 that actually kept closed key areas for future oil and gas exploration in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic coastline.
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As my colleague Myron Ebell reported earlier this week, Joe Romm pulled out of a scheduled debate on climate policy last Friday with the Heritage Foundation’s David Kreutzer.
Given the last-minute nature of Romm’s cancellation, the host of the debate initially used a bottle of Corona Light to symbolically take Romm’s place at the podium. I thought the beer bottle was a poor substitute, and replaced it with a plate of ice cubes. As the photo below shows, by the end of the event the ice cubes had undergone significant melting. There was, however, no suggestion that anthropogenic warming was the cause. On the other hand, I’m not sure there were any climate modelers in attendance.
In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a landmark study of mass hysteria and sociopsychosis titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
Mackay painstakingly analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology, and witch crazes. He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is not only not true, but also potentially deadly. His answer:
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
Conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves—I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words. How he would have delighted in the strange, self-flagellating notion that is anthropogenic warming. He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.
In fact, global warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history. The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations.
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On February 1, an urgent alert was sent to supporters of wind energy. It stated: “The PTC is the primary policy tool to promote wind energy development and manufacturing in the United States. While it is set to expire at the end of 2012 … the credit has already effectively expired. Congress has a choice to make: extend the PTC this month and keep the wind industry on track…”
The wind energy industry has reason for concern. America’s appetite for subsidies has waned. Congress is looking for any way it can to make cuts, and the twenty-year old Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind energy is in prime position for a cut. It naturally expires at the end of 2012. Without action, it will go away.
The payroll tax extension will be a hot topic over the next few weeks as it expires on February 29. Wind energy supporters are pushing to get the PTC extension included in the bill. Whether or not it is included will be largely up to public response. After all, regarding the PTC’s inclusion in the payroll tax extension bill, the February 1 alert stated: “our federal legislators heard us loud and clear.” In the December payroll tax bill negotiations, the wind energy PTC was placed on a “short list of provisions to be extended through that bill.” Wind supporters are worried—hence the rallying cry.
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Over at the American Spectator, my colleagues Vincent Vernuccio and Matt Patterson have an excellent piece about how the President’s Keystone punt has been received by organized labor. Here’s a roundup of reactions noted in their oped:
- Terry O’Sullivan, head of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), has called Obama’s action “politics at its worst,” saying that “once again the President has sided with environmentalists instead of blue collar construction workers.” O’Sullivan angrily vowed that “workers across the U.S. will not forget this.”
- Mark H. Ayers, president of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO has publicly hammered the jobs issue. In a January 18th press release, Ayers voiced the frustration of many union workers, saying “…with a national unemployment rate in construction at 16 percent nationally, it is beyond disappointing that President Obama placed a higher priority on politics rather than our nation’s number one challenge: jobs.”
- James T. Callahan, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, agrees, complaining to the Washington Post that Obama’s decision was “…a blow to America’s construction workers,” who are struggling in “the sector hardest hit by the recession.”
Read the whole thing here.
Thanks to the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, motorists are subject to a Soviet-style production quota for biofuels. Every year, Americans must purchase greater volumes of biofuels–motor fuels distilled from corn, soy, and plant matter–until 2022, when the production quota tops out at 36 billion gallons. Fifteen billion gallons of that figure would come from corn ethanol. Most of the rest must come from cellulosic ethanol, a fuel that doesn’t yet exist. (That’s right, the U.S. Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, a bill that requires the production of 16 billion gallons of an imaginary fuel). For biodiesel, the Energy Independence and Security Act requires the production of 500 million gallons in 2009, 650 million gallons in 2010, 800 million gallons in 2011, and 1 billion gallons this year. Thereafter, the biodiesel mandate remains at 1 billion gallons, although EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has the discretion to increase the quota.
Last year, EPA proposed to use its authority to increase the biodiesel mandate in 2013 to 1.28 billion gallons—a 28% increase over the statutory minimum. In December, however, EPA postponed the announcement of the 2013 production quota for biodiesel, and the Agency left open the possibility that it would keep the biodiesel mandate at 1 billion gallons. Naturally, EPA’s reticence outraged the biodiesel industry. According to Energy & Environment GreenWire (subscription required),
“There’s no question that the production capacity is there. The biodiesel industry can do it, and there’s no question that the 1.28 can be met,” said Ben Evans, director of federal communications at the National Biodiesel Board. “It’s really surprising to us that there would be this hesitation and the potential for moving it back to a billion. To us, it would really be a devastating blow.”
Of course, the effect would be “devastating” because the biodiesel industry simply cannot compete on an open fuel market. Don’t take my word for it! Even biodiesel producers are willing to concede that their product is inferior. From the same GreenWire article:
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In a previous post here, I noted the major problems with House GOP leadership’s proposal to link revenue from expanded domestic energy production with the Highway Trust Fund in their surface transportation reauthorization legislation. Since then, the three major portions have cleared their respective committees: House Natural Resources approved the drilling proposals, Transportation and Infrastructure passed the primary highway bill, and the revenue link was cleared by Ways and Means. A vote by the full House is expected sometime next week.
Observers expect the bill to fail, not only because there is very little for Democrats to like, but also because principled fiscal conservatives — from our “user-pays” coalition to Heritage Action to Club for Growth to RedState — have all slammed the legislation as a Big Government wolf wrapped in pro-market, pro-growth sheep’s clothing. This proposed bill would continue to federally fund highways at unsustainable levels and fails to address how states are to begin reconstructing their portions of the Interstate system. For instance, it explicitly bans states from tolling existing Interstate segments even for the purpose of reconstruction. Reconstruction to current highway construction guidelines by definition increases capacity, yet the tolling section author(s) apparently didn’t find this additional capacity enhancing enough to justify allowing states to implement an intelligent financing mechanism that can actually pay for the needed investment.
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Fresh off a nod from President Obama’s State of the Union speech, T. Boone Pickens has again began to circle the country touting the alleged benefits of providing subsidies for the transportation sector to convert more vehicles to natural gas power. Today, he writes in The Chicago Tribune:
If you are going to transform American energy to address the national security and economic risks associated with our OPEC oil dependence, there is only one solution: move our natural gas reserves into transportation, with an emphasis on the heavy-duty truck and fleet-vehicle markets.
Free-market advocates argue that’s bad public policy. They fail to understand that OPEC is far from a free market. They’ll tell you we shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the transportation fuel segments. I say it’s time to pick America over OPEC. Let’s go with anything American. I’m fine with the battery, but remember, it won’t move an 18-wheeler.
Imagine the impact natural gas could have in solving our energy problem. Targeting heavy-duty trucks and fleet vehicles — about 8.5 million in all — could cut our OPEC oil dependence in half in 10 years or less.
Fortunately, while we wait for Washington policymakers to lead, the move to replace more expensive, dirtier OPEC oil, diesel or gasoline with cheaper, cleaner domestic natural gas is gaining private-sector support. At an event in Chicago last week, two leaders in the natural gas vehicle industry — Navistar and Clean Energy Fuels — announced a plan to aggressively develop a comprehensive system to build natural-gas truck engines and provide the infrastructure to fuel them.
Over-the-road trucks tend to run the same routes on the same schedule. Drivers stop in the same places to rest, eat and refuel. Putting natural-gas refueling stations along the major travel routes is a relatively minor logistical issue. Building natural-gas engines for those trucks will be a major job creator.
The fact that OPEC isn’t a “free market” does not allow one to conclude that the U.S. should further distort markets without further argumentation, which Pickens does not provide, deciding to go the “national security” route that so many arguments deviate towards when they run out of good points.
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Mega Star Brad Pitt made a guest appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show this past Wednesday where he made a point to condemn the traditional gas-guzzler with an analogy of his new Academy Award-nominated Moneyball.
Brad explains: “It (Moneyball) was the story of this small market team that found the game unfair, they could not compete. They couldn’t buy the talent and if they developed the talent it was poached by the rich team, so what are they going to do to level the playing field? And these guys started questioning 150 years of baseball knowledge and they started with the question, ‘Just because we’ve been doing it this way for so long, does that mean it’s right?’ I equate it to the automobile, like if we invented the automobile today, would we invent a car, would we say, ‘I know! We’ll run it on a finite fossil fuel. We’ll export a half a trillion dollars of our GDP. We’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars on our military to protect that interest, and it will pollute the environment!’ You know, it just doesn’t make sense!”
I give Brad two thumbs, way down, for this elitist tripe. What celebrities seem to miss is that historically, the introduction of the fossil-fueled automobile has been one of the greatest emancipators, leveling the playing field by lifting many out of poverty through the access of affordable mobility. In The Best-Laid Plans, Randal O’Toole writes:
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