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:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.  We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.  The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.  But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.  We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise.  That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Taking these statements one at a time, yes, of course, “We, the people” acknowledge obligations to posterity. Among those obligations is to secure the blessings of liberty. Liberty is endangered when non-elected officials like those at the EPA enact climate policy and erode the separation of powers.

Another obligation to posterity is not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Federal monetary and housing policies destabilized financial markets in 2008, entitlement spending imperils America’s very solvency, carbon taxes or their regulatory equivalent could inflict huge job and GDP losses by making affordable energy costly and scarce, and the green crusade against coal mining, hydraulic fracturing, unconventional oil, and energy exports threatens one of the few bright spots in the economy today. Posterity will not thank us if policymakers foolishly try to tax, spend, and regulate America back to prosperity.

The U.S. contribution to global warming over the 21st century is projected to be small – about 0.2°C, according to the UN IPCC. Even an aggressive de-carbonization program costing hundreds of billions would theoretically avert only about 0.1°C by 2100. Posterity will not thank us for consuming vast resources with so little benefit to public health and welfare.

“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms,” the President says. But even assuming the President is right about the science, since even aggressive emission controls would at best avert only a tiny amount of warming, such policies would afford no protection from fires, drought, or storms.

And what does the President mean by the “overwhelming judgment of science” anyway? Mr. Obama implies that recent fires, drought, and storms would not have occurred but for anthropogenic climate change. That is ideology talking, not science.

That a warmer, drier climate will spawn more frequent forest fires and fires of longer duration is almost a tautology. Nonetheless, some studies find no change in global fire activity over the past century and more. Ocean cycles and forestry practices also influence the frequency and extent of wildfires. Whether recent U.S. wildfires are primarily due to global climate change or other factors is neither obvious nor easily determined.

As for drought, there is no long-term trend in U.S. soil moisture such as might be correlated with the increase in atmospheric GHG concentrations.

Regarding storms, studies find no long-term increase in the strength and frequency of land-falling hurricanes globally over the past 50-70 years and no trend in Atlantic tropical cyclone behavior over the past 370 years.

Hurricane Sandy was a ’super storm’ not because it was an intense hurricane (Sandy was a category 1 before making landfall), but because it was massive in area and merged with a winter frontal storm. The combined storm system contained more integrated kinetic energy (IKE) than Hurricane Katrina. Scientists simply do not know how global climate change affects the formation of such “hybrid” storms.

Inconvenient fact: The USA is currently enjoying the “longest streak ever recorded without an intense [category 3-5] hurricane landfall.”

Explains University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr.: ”When the Atlantic hurricane season starts next June 1, it will have been 2,777 days since the last time an intense (that is a Category 3, 4 or 5) hurricane made landfall along the US coast (Wilma in 2005). Such a prolonged period without an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900.”

If, as the President seems to assume, all weather anomalies are due to global climate change, then how would he explain the extraordinary 7-year “drought” of intense landfalling U.S. hurricanes?

Mr. Obama says that, “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.” Indeed. In the famous “Crisis of Confidence“ speech of July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter proposed a plan to obtain 20% of America’s energy from solar power by the year 2000. More than three decades later, solar provides 0.25% of U.S. energy (solar contributes 2.5% of all forms of renewable energy combined, which in turn provide 10% of total U.S. energy). Moreover, the piddling contributions of wind, solar power, and biofuels depend on a panoply of government favors: mandates, direct subsidies, and special tax breaks.

The allegedly “sustainable” energy sources championed by the President are not self-sustaining. The main reason is that they are inferior to fossil fuels in terms of energy density (bang for buck) and — in the case of wind and solar power – reliability and dispatchability.

Solyndra, the Obama administration’s mascot solar company that burned through $535 million of the taxpayers’ money before going broke, is not the only failure in the President’s green investment portfolio. The Institute for Energy Research provides information on eight other “stimulosers“ that also “failed, laid off workers, or have a bleak financial outlook.”

Because politicians get to play with other people’s money, hope continually triumphs over experience, and they never learn what three MIT scholars learned from the Carter administration’s energy programs:

If an energy technology is commercially viable, no government support is needed; if it is not commercially viable, no amount of government support can make it so.

The President says that, “America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise.” But that’s just it — how does he know, despite the Solyndra and other failures, the tiny market shares of politically-correct renewables, and the intractable dependence of renewables on policy privileges – that wind and solar power are the future? What information does he have that tens of thousands of savvy investors don’t?

The President alludes to the great clean energy ‘race’ that America supposedly cannot afford to lose. But as my colleague William Yeatman points out, the race is itself a creature of mandate and subsidy. China subsidizes its solar panel manufacturers, for example, because U.S. states establish Soviet-style production quota for renewable energy and EU countries subsidize renewable electricity via feed-in tariffs (FITs). China’s subsidies, in turn, are the official justification for the Stimulus loans to companies like Solyndra. But Beijing is flush with cash; Washington, deep in debt. We cannot outspend China in a subsidy war.

Throwing good money after bad makes even less sense given the global financial crisis and the cutbacks Spain, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, and Ontario (Canada) have been forced to make in their FITs. The renewable market increasingly resembles a bubble (over-investment relative to actual market demand). Yeatman cautions:

When the renewable energy bubble bursts, the global industry leader will be the biggest loser. With that in mind, the supposed race with China for green technological supremacy is one the U.S. would be wise to forfeit.

The climate segment of Mr. Obama’s speech concludes with a theological flourish:

That [investing in clean tech] is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

A lot may be implied in those words. Obama refers to the creed — the philosophy of rights and government — articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He seems to suggest that its meaning for our times lies in the doctrine of ‘creation care,’ a green variant of progressive theology. But whereas the Declaration articulated a philosophy of limited government, green theology aims to expand the reach and scope of government. Al Gore gave voice to similar views in his 1992 book on “ecology and the human spirit,” Earth in the Balance. He famously  declared that the time had come to “make rescue of the environment the central organizing principle of civilization.”

Where does Mr. Obama stand on creation care theology and Gore’s central organizing principle? I don’t know but will loudly applaud any journalist who, interviewing the President, has the curiosity and moxie to pursue this line of inquiry.

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.

Consider, for example, EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) as it pertains to Texas.  In the August 2010 proposed CSAPR, the Lone Star State was found to be in compliance with the regulation’s particulate matter emissions limits. Without notice, in the July 2011 final CSAPR, EPA imposed on Texas the harshest particulate matter emissions limits of any State. The technology required by EPA’s final CSAPR requires three years to install, but EPA gave the State only 6 months to do so. Recently, the non-partisan operator of Texas’s power grid warned that the CSAPR could lead to blackouts.

Texas was left out of EPA’s deliberations for the CSAPR, but the State will have a voice before the judicial system. In late December, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. stayed implementation of the CSAPR, which was supposed to take effect on January 1, until the court decides on the merits of Texas’s allegations that EPA violated federal laws regarding proper administrative procedure.

The previous example is as blunt a violation of due process as one could imagine. Elsewhere, like in Appalachia, EPA has proven subtler. Mountaintop mining is sanctioned by the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and it essential for the competitiveness of Appalachia’s coal industry. Yet it is loathed by environmentalists, which is why EPA has had this industry in its cross-hairs since President Obama took office.

To that end, EPA alleges that West Virginia and Kentucky’s existing water quality standards are unacceptable because they insufficiently protect an insect (the mayfly) from surface coal mining operations. However, EPA already has approved these states’ Clean Water Act permitting regimes, and this complicates matters for the Agency. For environmental federalism conflicts such as this, the Clean Water Act stipulates a resolution process, one that allows states significant participation. EPA, however, didn’t want to delay its crackdown on mountaintop mining removal. Therefore, in April 2010, EPA issued new water quality standards that were officially “non-binding,” but which EPA nonetheless informed States to follow when it issues Clean Water Act permits. And if they do not, EPA has demonstrated that it will veto permits thus granted. The result is that West Virginia and Kentucky are beholden to a regulatory regime characterized by what Rep. Nick Rahall (D-West Virginia) describes as “do or dare permits”: Appalachian States must follow EPA’s “non-binding” guidance, or risk EPA’s veto.

While West Virginia and Kentucky have been shut out of EPA’s deliberations on new water quality standards, they will have their day in court. These States sued EPA, and this spring a federal district court in Washington, D.C. will decide on the merits of their allegations that EPA violated administrative procedure laws in its rush to halt mountaintop mining removal.

EPA is being similarly sneaky in its dealings with New Mexico on a visibility protection policy pursuant to the Clean Air Act. Instead of relying on “non-binding” guidance documents in order to suppress input, EPA is claiming that it has no choice but to ignore New Mexico, due to deadlines established by environmentalist special interest lawyers.

Here’s the background: Under the Regional Haze provision of the Clean Air Act, States are required to improve the view at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. On June 2, the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board unanimously approved a Regional Haze plan that would meet the federal law and EPA’s own rules, at a cost of $34 million.

EPA, however, refused to even consider New Mexico’s visibility strategy. On August 5, the Agency imposed a Regional Haze plan that would cost New Mexico ratepayers $370 million–a nearly tenfold increase over those approved by New Mexico officials. EPA claimed that it did not have the time to consider the state’s plan, because it had to act before an August 22 deadline established by a consent decree with WildEarth Guardians, and environmental litigation organization. At best, EPA’s claim that it had no discretion is malarkey—it has plenty of legal latitude, and EPA’s claim to the contrary is absurd. At worst, this is an incidence of wink*wink* consent decrees, whereby EPA and environmentalist litigation outfits enact policy in the court-house, instead of having to deal with the rigors of proper administrative procedure.

In either case, the result was the same: EPA refused to consider New Mexico’s plan. The state may have been shut out by EPA, but it will be heard by a group of judges. New Mexico has a pending case against EPA in the 10^th federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado.

For rule-of-law proponents like me, the silver lining is EPA likely will get spanked in the courts. Even so, the country loses, because the President’s campaign talk about transparency and openness has been exposed as mumbo-jumbo.

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!

Most of the money went to the Energy and Labor Departments. Budgets ballooned. To cite a typical example, in 2008, the Department of Energy’s weatherization program budget went from $450 million to $5 billion. Making matters worse, federal bureaucrats were told to spend the stimulus as fast as possible, in order to jumpstart job-creation. Exploding budgets and a mandate to rush money out the door—that’s a recipe for poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. This is borne out by an increasing number of watchdog reports concluding that stimulus spending for green goals was wasteful. Here’s a laundry list of what they’ve found so far:

• On November 2, Eliot P. Lewis, the Department of Labor’s IG, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the Labor Department received $435 million to train 96,000 people in the renewable energy trade. The goal was to create 80,000 green jobs. Through June 30, according to Mr. Lewis’s testimony, the Labor Department had spent $130 million, which is 30% of the program budget, and created a scant 1,336 jobs, which is 2% of the program target.

• During the same Congressional hearing, the Department of Energy IG Gregory Friedman said that he had launched more than 100 criminal investigations into green energy spending. Each one is a potential scandal.

• GreenWire’s (subscription required) Annie Snider has reported on a series of IG investigations by the Department of Defense faulting the military for wasteful stimulus spending on green energy projects. The report titles say it all: “American Revoery and Reinvestment Act Wind Turbine Projects at Long-Range Radar Site in Alaska Were Not Adequately Planned”; “The Departmnet of the Navy Spent Recovery Act Funds on Photovoltaic Projects That Were Not Cost-Effective”; “U.S. Air Force Academy Could Have Significantly Improved Planning Funding, and Initial Execution of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Solar Array Project”; and “Geothermal Energy Development Project at Naval Air Force Station Fallon, Nevada, Did Not Meet Recovery Act Requirements.”

• On November 7, the Department of Energy Office of the Inspector General issued a “management alert” regarding the Western Area Power Administration’s $3 billion, stimulus-created loan program to facilitate the transmission of electricity from renewable energy projects in the west. According to the IG alert, “Western had not implemented the necessary safeguards to ensure its commitment of funding was optimally protected.”

• In October, Resources for the Future released a report suggesting that the $3 billion, stimulus funded “cash for clunkers” program, whereby the government subsidized the purchase of fuel efficient cars for consumers that agreed to junk their less fuel efficient cars, was an economic and environmental failure.

• Since February, the Energy and Commerce Committee has been investigating Solyndra, the California solar panel manufacturer that declared bankruptcy in September, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for a $535 million stimulus-funded loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

Why is the green stimulus failing? As I note above, ballooning budgets and a mandate to spend fast are conducive to waste.

More fundamentally, central planning of the economy is a loser. Invariably, politics corrupts the process. Members of Congress are less concerned about the economic viability of the industries into which they invest taxpayer money, and much more concerned with getting pork to their districts. Civil servants, no matter how disinterested, know that their political overlords are watching their decisions carefully, so as to ensure that taxpayers give-aways reach their constituents. (For an archetypical example of a Member of Congress browbeating a civil servant, see this post about Sen. Al Franken shaking down Energy Secretary Steven Chu).

When parochial politics isn’t interfering, crony capitalism is. According to “Throw Them All Out,” a new book by Peter Shweizer, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted by the stimulus-created loan guarantee program (whence the Solyndra debacle) “went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers.” Of course, political payback is a poor substitute for sound financial analysis.

Gross fiscal mismanagement by government attracts media like flies to dung. So far, most coverage is by local papers reporting on local failures. (See “Seattle’s Green Jobs Program a Bust,” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and “Stimulus Funds Provide Training, But Openings Few in State,” by the Detroit News.) However, even the New York Times, whose editorial board supports green energy subsidies, published a story titled, “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live up to Promises.” Expect many more of these types of articles as the watchdogs continue to do their work.

As the negative press mounts, the President will become ever-more burdened by his foolish bet on green energy.

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.”

In May 2010, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a deceptive advertising complaint with the FTC, and GM shortly thereafter stopped running the ads.  CEI also filed a Freedom of Information request with Treasury for documents on the ad campaign.  Those documents were finally released late last month, after a year of delay – far beyond the 20-day legal deadline for responding to FOIA requests.

CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman laments that “the US Treasury Department aided General Motors in its fraudulent claim that it fully repaid its government loans,” pointing out that “the detailed nature of their cooperation is demonstrated in the documents that the Department has finally produced, 12 long months after our original request.  Now, the Treasury Department is re-enacting this smoke-and-mirrors routine on behalf of Chrysler,” Kazman observed.

The documents show GM coordinating PR strategy with the Obama Administration more than three weeks before launching the campaign.  The White House received some of those GM materials at least two weeks before the ad campaign began.  The Treasury Department delayed in responding to CEI’s FOIA request until after GM and Chrysler’s profits  temporarily spiked, leading to the Administration’s current PR campaign touting the alleged “success” of the auto bailout.  For example, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wrote a Washington Post Op-Ed on June 1, 2011 with a similarly-misleading statement that Chrysler had repaid its government loans.  On June 3, Obama himself will give a speech in Toledo, Ohio defending the auto bailout.

The communications between the Treasury, the White House, and GM on this PR effort were extensive.  Starting on March 30, 2010, Brian Deese from the Executive Office of the President and many Treasury Department officials began exchanging emails related to the announcement.  (See pages 55-59, 97-102.)  These emails included draft schedules, draft remarks to be given by GM CEO Ed Whitacre, and draft press releases from both GM and the Treasury Department.  See pp. 9-14; 18-24; 36-39; 83-96.

The Treasury Department saw the misleading advertisements GM was planning to make in advance, and did not object, despite having ample opportunity to object.

Indeed, Treasury Secretary Geithner issued a statement at the start of GM’s ad campaign, trumpeting its misleading claims, crowing that “GM had repaid in full the $4.7 billion balance it owed under the government’s Trouble Asset Relief Program.” But this so-called “repayment” was just a deceptive accounting trick. GM used government bailout money to make the “repayment.”  As the Washington Examiner noted, Geithner was endorsing a “blatant misrepresentation.”

More importantly, this so-called “repayment” was just a drop in the bucket compared to what GM has received from taxpayers.  The federal government had yet to recover the lion’s share of the more than $50 billion it loaned the company.  Why?  Because that $50 billion was mostly “converted into stock held by the Treasury Department” – stock worth far less than the billions the federal government injected into the company.

These claims were deeply misleading, as Senator Charles Grassley and the government’s own TARP Inspector General noted.  GM’s statement that “We have repaid our government loans in full, with interest” was misleading,“according to Neil Barofsky, inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program . . . ‘the source of funds for these quality [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” Senator Grassley noted that “‘TARP loans were not repaid from money GM is earning selling cars, as GM and the administration have claimed in their speeches, press releases and television commercials.’”

Eventually, financial reporters for newspapers like the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle ridiculed these false claims.  Gretchen Morgenson of the Times pointed out that “the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.” Kathleen Pender of the Chronicle noted that “GM repaid its government loan with other government money.”  The Washington Times observed that “General Motors Lost $3.4 billion” just before running the ad; “GM specifically used funds it received from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to pay off the government loan.”

Only after the falsity of GM’s claims became obvious to the general public did some Administration officials distance themselves from them.  An April 29 email shows Treasury trying to “prepare a response today” to escalating criticism. (See pg. 11)  On May 10, 2010, former auto czar Steve Rattner publicly admitted that “GM may have slightly elasticized the reality of things” in its claims of repayment.   Treasury officials privately began to look for ways to respond to this reality.   Rattner’s successor, Ron Bloom, wanted “a couple bullet points… for response if this comes up.”  (See pp. 61-62.)

The Treasury Department’s role in facilitating GM’s deception may be far greater than the documents reveal, because the Treasury Department withheld some of the documents covered by the FOIA request, including portions of documents shedding light on White House involvement.   For example, a blacked out item in the Treasury document release is a March 30 email from Brian Deese in the Executive Office regarding GM’s upcoming campaign.  All of its content was blacked out except for the opening words, “Hi guys.” (See pages 58-59)

The Treasury Department waited until after the automakers’ finances had temporarily improved to produce the documents.  GM’s finances have been temporarily propped up by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Toyota, and by earlier erroneous claims that Toyota’s automobiles were unsafe.  Its profits have also been artificially puffed up by massive deferral of billions of dollars in growing UAW pension obligations.  Moreover, as Conn Carroll notes in the Washington Examiner, Chrysler recent auto bailout pay back is in large measure fake.

As journalist Mickey Kaus has noted, “Sales and prices are up recently in part only because competing Japanese car suppliers have been crippled by the earthquake and tsunami. GM’s stock fell today and is still below the initial IPO price.”

Before that, GM’s finances were temporarily buoyed by bad PR regarding Toyota’s alleged safety defects in its cars, which turned out to be largely bogus.  (The Toyota crashes turned out to have been caused by driver error, not manufacturing defects).

These things temporarily drove buyers away from Toyota to GM and Chrysler, artificially pumping up their profits.  But massive earthquakes and Tsunamis like the one that hit Japan occur there only once or twice a century, and can’t keep GM going in the long run: “Car sales sputtered in May, slumping to levels that were much lower than expected as higher vehicle prices led consumers to put off purchases in the face of a weakening economy. Tightening supplies of vehicles after the Japan earthquake emboldened many companies . . . to raise car and truck prices, a strategy that analysts and investors said had backfired. U.S. automakers” like GM “reported sales on Wednesday that fell short of expectations as the industry experienced its lowest sales rate in eight months.”

GM stock is worth money partly because its government ownership stake allows it to claim up to $45 billion in tax savings that it would otherwise have had to forfeit as a result of its bankruptcy. GM is also receiving lots of taxpayer subsidies for its Chevy Volt, despite revelations that it lied about that car, which it was trumpeting in a “publicity stunt” to curry favor with politicians crusading against global warming.

GM still owes taxpayers at least $29.4 billion, and its finance arm, GMAC, owes taxpayers billions more. In a sense, taxpayers lost money on the sale of some of the government’s shares in General Motors in a 2010 IPO that was touted by government officials. (They got at least $9 billion less for the stock that was sold in the IPO than taxpayers originally paid for that stock.)

Even Kaus, who grudgingly supported the bailouts, thinks that people who bought GM stock were “suckers,” since GM faces hidden perils, still has too much red tape and inefficiency, lacks “effective internal controls,” and is the beneficiary of accounting gimmicks and unrealistic assumptions about its future market share.

In addition to the $50 billion, GM received billions in additional handouts through programs like the extraordinarily wasteful Cash for Clunkers (which cost taxpayers and used-car and car-parts businesses billions), and $17 billion given to its finance arm, GMAC.

GM might never have needed a bailout if it had just received relief from harmful regulations such as CAFE rules (which wipe out at least 50,000 jobs). It might have survived despite GM’s self-inflicted wounds from poor management, excessive wages and gold-plated union benefits (worth up to $70 an hour), and rigid union work rules.

Obama’s car czar left most of those wasteful work rules and excessive benefits intact, and gave the UAW much of General Motors’ stock, even though the UAW helped bankrupt the company, and the company has value today because the taxpayers pumped billions into the company (and engineered the wiping out of General Motors’ bondholders, some of whom were non-union employees who had invested their life savings in the company).

Veteran political commentator Michael Barone called the Obama administration’s treatment of Chrysler and GM bondholders “gangster government.”  GMU law professor Todd Zywicki called it an attack on “the rule of law.”  Such treatment may well discourage investors from investing in industrial companies in the future, reducing job creation and investment in the American economy.

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.

What the Obama Administration is doing is like the thug who, while breaking your arms, kindly offers to take care of the hang nail that he spots.

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.

The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act codified a gallons-per-year corn ethanol production schedule (this year, it is about 13 billion gallons), but the Obama administration has the authority to adjust it down. And because it hasn’t used this authority, the President deserves an F-minus for promoting food insecurity since 2008.

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.

To make its point, the L.A. Times editorial board cited two examples of the president supposedly abandoned his green base as a sop to industry. The first was the EPA’s decision last week to “indefinitely” delay the implementation of Maximum Achievable Control Technology retrofits on industrial boilers to control the emissions of hazardous air pollutants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. According to the L.A. Times editorial board:

The EPA indefinitely rescinded the proposal this week, citing Obama’s January executive order on regulations and claiming that the agency hadn’t had time to properly address industry concerns about the rule since a draft was released in September…. The economy is the top subject on Americans’ minds, and Obama no doubt figures he can blunt criticism of his regulatory record and maybe corral some independent voters by cutting smokestack industries a little slack. Never mind that the economic calculus doesn’t pencil out; according to EPA estimates, the rule on industrial boilers would cost polluters $1.4 billion a year, but the value of its health benefits would range from $22 billion to $54 billion. And never mind that the rule would prevent up to 6,500 premature deaths each year.

The L.A. Times editorial board made two errors in this passage. The first was to claim that the EPA acted to address industry concerns. To be sure, American industry is aghast at this administrations war on energy, but that wasn’t the reason that the EPA delayed the study. Rather, the EPA acted due to…opposition from within the Obama administration.

That’s right. This wasn’t the first time the EPA tried to delay the rule. It tried last January, after a still-unpublished Commerce Department study eviscerated the EPA’s economic analysis. Despite requests from Republican Members of Congress, the administration won’t release the study. So much for “transparency.”

The L.A. Times editorial board’s second error is related: It parroted the EPA’s ridiculous cost-benefit analysis, the same one that the Commerce Department blew out of the water. To get an idea of what the Commerce Department objected to, read this recent Competitive Enterprise Institute study by Garrett A. Vaughn, “Clearing the Air on the EPA’s False Regulatory Benefit-Cost Estimates and Its Anti-Carbon Agenda.”

The L.A. Times editorial board’s other example of President Obama supposedly forsaking environmentalists is the administration’s having put on the “slow track” new toxic rules for coal ash. OK…so the coal ash rule is on the “slow track”… I’ll grant that to the L.A. Times editorial board. But what about: the Hazardous Air Pollutant Utility MACT, Regional Haze, unprecedented greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, unprecedented tightening of all criteria pollutants for National Ambient Air Quality Standards, a potential re-interpretation of Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to impose a 100-foot buffer rule, the creation of a new “pollutant,” salinity, under the Clean Water Act, and once-through cycling. Every single one of these “fast-track” regulations is targeted at either coal supply or coal demand. The L.A. Times editorial board can’t see the forest for the trees.

The L.A. Times’s whiny editorial evinces a character defect of the environmental movement as a whole. Namely, these green special interests are NEVER satisfied.

Consider this L.A. Times op-ed from last week, “The Wrong Sites for Solar,” in which two environmentalists argued that Obama administration’s push for solar power on federal lands is a bad idea, because it would defile a desert.

Or, note this recent L.A. Times story, about how the Sierra Club is demanding that California Governor Jerry Brown overhaul the State’s plan for a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme, so as to make it more onerous on what’s left of California’s industrial base.

They get solar power…but it’s not good enough, because it might prove inimical to a turtle in a desert wasteland. They get a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme… but it’s not good enough, because it wouldn’t chase away all of California’s “dirty” industry. There’s no winning with environmentalist special interests.

Thanks to the greens’ implacable nature, the energy industry in California is a total basket case, as I explain with Jeremy Lott in this American Spectator piece.

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.

EPA is also considering acceding to requests from Congress and electric utilities to extend the public comment period for its proposed Clean Air Act rule for coal-fired power plants. A good excuse for extending the comment period is that a simple mathematical error in EPA’s calculations has been pointed out by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, a utility industry coalition.

The boiler MACT (which stands for Maximum Achievable Control Technology), cement MACT, and utility MACT rules would limit air emissions of mercury and approximately 70 other metals and other substances.  The delays in finalizing and implementing these three rules may postpone the considerable economic damage that each of them will do until after the election.  Environmental pressure groups are naturally not happy with anything that delays shutting down the U. S. economy, but there are rumors that they have been told by the White House to shut up until after the election.

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.
Additional increases in prices at this stage of the economic cycle risk derailing the global economic recovery and are neither in the interest of producing nor of consuming countries. Oil importing developing countries are most likely to be seriously affected by high oil prices, undermining their economic and social well-being. In these circumstances, enhancing consumer-producer dialogue is urgently important to reach both short- and long-term solutions. The Governing Board urges action from producers that will help avoid the negative global economic consequences which a further sharp market tightening could cause, and welcomes commitments to increase supply. We stand ready to work with producers as well as non-member consumers; in this constructive spirit, we are prepared to consider using all tools that are at the disposal of IEA member countries.

This blog has made a theme of President Barack Obama’s war on domestic energy production. See here, here, here, and here. Here’s to hoping that the President heeds the IEA’s request.

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.

This is why I’m suspicious of the President’s apparent pro-drilling posture during his Saturday address. In addition to prosecuting “speculators” and removing Big Oil “subsidies,” President Obama promised to expand domestic production. Here’s what he said,

Second, we should increase safe and responsible oil production here at home.  Last year, America’s oil production reached its highest level since 2003*.  But I believe that we should expand oil production in America – even as we increase safety and environmental standards.

To do this, I am directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, while respecting sensitive areas, and to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic.  We plan to lease new areas in the Gulf of Mexico as well, and work to create new incentives for industry to develop their unused leases both on and offshore.

*[The President is being disingenuous. Expanded oil production in America has been driven primarily by production from the huge Bakken Formation in North Dakota.  And this was made possible by the fact that the oil is underneath private land. Were the Bakken Formation on federal land, it would have been locked up by the Obama Administration.]

The absence of specifics in the President’s pro-production plan gives me pause. I’m not the only one who harbors this concern. The pro-drilling editorial board at the New Orleans Times Picayune is also waiting to see real action before it believes the President.