BTU tax

Why Is Congress Lethargic about Energy?

by Marlo Lewis on April 24, 2013

in Blog, Features

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This week National Journal’s Energy Experts Blog poses the question: “What’s holding back energy & climate policy.” So far 14 wonks have posted comments including yours truly. What I propose to do here is ‘revise and extend my remarks’ to provide a clearer, more complete explanation of Capitol Hill’s energy lethargy.

To summarize my conclusions in advance, there is no momentum building for the kind of comprehensive energy legislation Congress enacted in 2005 and 2007, or the major energy bills the House passed in 2011, because:

  • We are not in a presidential election year so Republicans have less to gain from passing pro-energy legislation just to frame issues and clarify policy differences for the electorate;
  • Divided government makes it virtually impossible either for congressional Republicans to halt and reverse the Obama administration’s regulatory war on fossil fuels or for Hill Democrats to pass cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, or a national clean energy standard;
  • Democrats paid a political price for cap-and-trade and won’t champion carbon taxes without Republicans agreeing to commit political suicide by granting them bipartisan cover;
  • The national security and climate change rationales for anti-fossil fuel policies were always weak but have become increasingly implausible thanks to North America’s resurgence as an oil and gas producing province, Climategate, and developments in climate science;
  • Multiple policy failures in Europe and the U.S. have eroded public and policymaker support for ‘green’ energy schemes;
  • It has become increasingly evident that the Kyoto crusade was a foredoomed attempt to put policy carts before technology horses; and,
  • The EPA is ‘enacting’ climate policy via administrative fiat, so environmental campaigners no longer need legislation to advance their agenda.

[click to continue…]

Election Exegesis: BTU Tax Redux

by Chris Horner on November 3, 2010

in Blog

Reconciling the various, final pre-election surveys of voter sentiment indicates a that “it’s the spending, stupid.” It is remarkable how quickly public consciousness has developed to know that debt equals taxes.

Cap-and-trade is now dead, having proven, as we predicted serially, to be the 1993 BTU tax, redux. Members in the House voted on both measures on the assurance the Senate would not leave them hanging out to dry, isolated with that difficult vote, only to see their trust misplaced. As opposition grew more intense from the people-who were not at the table when their wealth was redistributed to various interests-the senators realized that they wanted to save jobs. Theirs.

We also see that cap-and-trade’s ugly Plan B cousin, “green jobs,” is not only sure to be an obsession very soon. The public will equally soon come to understand the bankrupting expense of “green jobs” programs: in President Obama’s erstwhile model, Spain, it cost them $750,000 per (temporary) “green job,” placing the nation’s energy infrastructure and economy in peril leading to an ongoing political crisis.

All over Europe Obama’s previously touted model states are struggling to rein in the subsidy schemes which threatened to expand the Greek contagion. These are economic black holes paying small fortunes for each job created, crowding out private sector growth, displacing real jobs responding to market forces with temporary jobs that disappear when the subsidy does, as it must (see: “census jobs”). All the while they necessitate higher energy costs as part of the plan. That makes them much worse than other make-work programs like ditch-digging-and-filling.

Still, just last week Obama’s Energy Department claimed in the Washington Post that its own stimulus version of the scheme was an “unqualified success”-at a half a million dollars per temporary job created! Moreover, all parties acknowledged in the article that the bubble has to be renewed annually or it bursts. Somehow this disastrous failure proved to the Obama administration that “clean-energy investments [sic] are ready for prime time.” Oh, dear.

The coming, attempted ‘green jobs’ binge is no more than WPA-style spending, which FDR confidantes admitted as a flop, and the debt to underwrite which delays the recovery further, just as the public seems to recognize the Obama agenda has already done.

There is the coming “energy” debate in a nutshell, and how, in a rational world, it will play out. Fortunately, ‘green shoots’ of rationality do seem to be popping up. The public realize “it’s the spending, stupid” and grasp the illusory nature of economic activity predicated on such “stimulus”-style debt-spending.