President Obama’s second inaugural speech featured climate change more prominently than did his first inaugural address. As Greenwire (subscription required) observed:
Gone was Obama’s roundabout reference to climate change through “the specter of a warming planet” from four years ago. This time, the president put the issue front and center.
Will that make any difference legislatively? Probably not. In the House, Republicans opposed to cap-and-trade, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and carbon taxes are still in charge.
Is the President’s renewed emphasis on climate change just a sop to his environmentalist base? Doubtful. As a second termer, Obama has less reason politically to restrain his ‘progressive’ impulses. Several regulatory options are now in play:
- The Department of Interior could list more species as threatened or endangered based on climate change concerns.
- The President could finally veto the Keystone XL pipeline — a key objective of the climate alarm movement.
- The EPA could issue GHG performance standards for existing (as distinct from new or modified) coal power plants, as well as GHG performance standards for other industrial categories (refineries, cement production facilities, steel mills, paper mills, etc.).
- The EPA could finally act on petitions pending from the Bush administration to set GHG emission standards for marine vessels, aircraft, and non-road vehicles.
- The EPA could finally act on a December 2009 petition by the Center for Biological Diversity and 350.Org to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for carbon dioxide (CO2) and other GHGs.
I’ll make one prediction: If Obama does not veto the Keystone XL Pipeline after talking the talk on climate change, green groups will go ballistic (even though, Cato Institute scholar Chip Knappenberger calculates, full-throttle operation of the Keystone XL Pipeline would add an inconsequential 0.0001°C/yr to global temperatures). My colleague Myron Ebell reasonably speculates that Obama’s tough talk on climate was a signal to green groups to organize the biggest anti-Keystone protest ever.
Now let’s examine the climate change segment of Obama’s inaugural speech: [click to continue…]
Barack Obama swept into the Presidency promising a new political order, one characterized by “transparency” and “openness.” Three years later, the President’s lofty campaign promises are belied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s record of suppression.
Federal agencies cannot issue regulations willy-nilly; rather, they are bound to rules stipulating administrative procedure, in order to ensure the voice of affected parties is heard. Obama’s EPA, however, evinces a troubling tendency to circumvent these procedural rules. Regulated entities are being subjected to controversial, onerous regimes, before they even have the opportunity to read the rules, much less voice an objection. The wayward Agency is exercising an unanswerable power, straight out of a Kafka novella.
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Stimulus spending on environmentalist policy is a green albatross around the neck of President Barack Obama. Inspectors General are having a field day auditing stimulus-funded programs for so-called “green jobs,” and the media LOVES stories about wasted taxpayer money. What started as a sop to his environmentalist base, now threatens to become a slow-drip nightmare of negative press. The timing couldn’t be worse for the President. It takes time to disburse scores of billions of dollars, so we are only now starting to scrutinize stimulus spending. By November 2012, we’ll be able to account for most of the money, and unless the current trend changes radically, the Executive in Chief is going to look conspicuously incompetent.
Here’s the back-story: In early 2009, the Executive and Legislative branches of government had a popular mandate to defibrillate America’s moribund economy with a huge injection of taxpayer dollars. Instead of limiting this “stimulus” to state bailouts and infrastructure spending, the Obama administration (led by climate “czar” and former EPA administrator Carol Browner) and the Congressional majority (led by House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills)) also sought to advance environmentalist policy. As a result, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus, included almost $70 billion in spending for green jobs and renewable energy infrastructure.
Every single link along the green energy supply chain was showered with subsidies. There was funding for green jobs training, funding for factories to make green products, and funding to incentivize demand for green goods and services. It was as like a green Gosplan!
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Obama Administration officials had advance notice that General Motors would run deceptive ads claiming to have paid taxpayers back for its bailout, and did not veto or object to those ads despite the opportunity to do so. Only later did Administration officials distance themselves from those deceptive claims, and they did so only after the falsity of those claims became so obvious to the public that they could no longer be parroted. Treasury Secretary Geithner had parroted those deceptive claims, which then drew criticism from the TARP inspector general, members of Congress, and financial reporters. Geithner publicly repeated GM’s deceptive claims, even though the Treasury Department had weeks in which to review GM’s claims and discover their inaccuracy.
Treasury Department Documents released last week in response to a think-tank’s Freedom of Information Act request make this clear. Those documents illustrate that GM and the Obama Administration coordinated GM’s PR strategy regarding the company’s controversial TV and print ad campaign in 2010, in which the car maker misleadingly claimed to have repaid what it received from taxpayers. In those ads, GM’s then-CEO, Ed Whitacre, claimed GM had already repaid its government bailout loan “in full, with interest, five years ahead of schedule.”
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After a five-month review, the Obama Administration announced this week that it had gotten rid of, was going to get rid of, or was considering getting rid of several dozen unnecessary regulations. The total savings could add up to several billions of dollars a year.
As part of the rollout, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was reviewing 31 regulations for elimination. EPA also announced that it had suspended the new rules regulating milk spills under the Clean Water Act. That will save dairy farmers an estimated $146 million a year. Ending another regulation will save gas station owners $67 million a year.
This exercise indicates the level of contempt that President Barack Obama and his Administration have for the American people. They think that we are so stupid that they can fool us with some piddling trimming while they push full speed ahead with their regulatory onslaught. As Wayne Crews of CEI shows in Ten Thousand Commandments: an Annual Snapshot of the Regulatory State, the Obama Administration has over 4000 new regulations in the pipeline. The EPA is trying to raise energy prices for all Americans and destroy jobs by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. And EPA is also targeting specific industries, such as coal, with job-killing regulations.
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The non-profit Chicago Council on Global Affairs this week gave the Obama administration a B-minus grade for its progress in furthering food security in poor countries, according to a story in today’s ClimateWire (subscription required).
I do not understand how any rational foreign policy expert could award the Obama administration a B-minus for its performance on global food security. This high a score is possible only if the U.S. was graded on a curve with North Korea and Zimbabwe.
During the period under evaluation by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, America’s Soviet-style production quota for ethanol, a motor fuel distilled from corn, increased almost 4 billion gallons, or 104 billion pounds of maize. This year American farmers will dedicate about a third of the U.S. corn crop—the largest in the world—to ethanol. As I explain here, here, and here, this massive distortion pushes up the price of foodstuffs on the global grains and oilseeds market, which harms urbanites in developing countries. Simply put, our stupid ethanol policy is one of the greatest threats to food security in the world today, if not the greatest.
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The Los Angeles Times editorial board last week penned a widely circulated thesis that “[t]he environment and public health will be thrown under a bus for the sake of his [President Barack Obama’s] reelection in 2012.” While I would love, love, love for this to be true, it isn’t; the L.A. Times editorial board’s contention that the president has abandoned greens to score political points is bunk.
In fact, this administration is waging a war on conventional energy supply and demand in this country, with very real repercussions for everyday Americans. Just ask the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, oil and gas drillers along the Gulf, or coal miners in Appalachia, all of whom have urged the Congress to roll back the president’s regulatory crackdown in an effort to protect their livelihoods.
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The 2012 presidential election is starting to bend some of the Obama Administration’s environmental and energy policies. I have noted previously that the White House realizes that gas prices are a huge threat to President Barack Obama’s re-election. Consequently, the President is trying to shift the blame to oil companies and speculators while at the same time talking up what his Administration is doing to increase domestic oil production. The reality, of course, is that the Obama Administration has moved across the board to decrease oil production in federal lands and offshore areas.
Another sign of the Administration’s focus on the President’s re-election is that the Environmental Protection Agency has suddenly started paying attention to the concerns of industry. The timetables for new regulations of coal ash disposal and of surface coal mining in Appalachia have been extended. EPA announced last week that it was reconsidering, but not delaying, some parts of its new Clean Air Act rule for cement plants. This week EPA suspended indefinitely a similar rule for industrial boilers that it had promulgated in February. EPA said that it will conduct more analyses and re-open the public comment period for the boiler rule.
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The Wall Street Journal today reported on a statement by the International Energy Agency’s governing board, calling on oil producing countries to increase their output to “help avoid the negative global economic consequences which a further sharp market tightening [i.e., higher oil prices] could cause.”
Here’s the full IEA statement:
The IEA Governing Board, at its regular quarterly meeting on 18-19 May, examined oil market developments and their impact on the global economy. Despite a near-10% correction since 5 May, oil prices remain at elevated levels driven by market fundamentals, geopolitical uncertainty and future expectations. The IEA Governing Board expressed serious concern that there are growing signs that the rise in oil prices since September is affecting the economic recovery by widening global imbalances, reducing household and business income, and placing upward pressure on inflation and interest rates. As global demand for oil increases seasonally from May to August, there is a clear, urgent need for additional supplies on a more competitive basis to be made available to refiners to prevent a further tightening of the market.
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With gas prices hovering near $4/gallon, Democrats are trotting out fanciful “solutions” to temper the price of oil.
On Saturday, President rolled out a three-part plan to relieve Americans’ pain at the pump. The third part was the elimination of Big Oil “subsidies” (in fact, they are tax breaks, not subsidies). This doesn’t make any sense. The point of the tax breaks to Big Oil is to decrease the cost of production. That is, they make oil cheaper to extract. Removing these “subsidies” will in no way decrease the price of gas.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are blaming evil “speculators” for bidding up the price of oil. This is utter malarkey. The price of oil is dictated by a global market. Ill-defined “speculators” are a straw man.
Removing Big Oil’s “subsidies” and prosecuting “speculators” are empty political gimmicks of the sort that the 2008 version of Obama campaigned against. (So much for “Change,” right?) I suspect that the President and Senate Democrats are relying on these bogus non-solutions because, otherwise, they’d have to acknowledge that the price of oil is a function of supply and demand. And if they concede that the market, and not “subsidies” or “speculators,” is to blame for high oil prices, then they’d also have to acknowledge that increasing supply would decrease the price. That is, they’d have to admit that “drill, baby, drill” works. Of course, they don’t want to do that, because doing so would upset their environmentalist base.
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