The ironically-named Center for American Progress posted a blog by Daniel Weiss and Stewart Boss this week that argues that conservative groups are opposing the T. Boone Pickens Earmark bill (H. R. 1380) that would provide subsidies to Big Natural Gas on the grounds that subsidies distort the market, while at the same time the same groups are defending subsidies to Big Oil. For the record, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for which I work, opposes all subsidies and mandates. These include subsidies to oil companies. The claim that groups like CEI support tax subsidies for oil companies is based on the ridiculous re-definition by the left of standard business deductions taken by all companies as tax subsidies when taken by oil companies.
Weiss’s lengthy blog is predictably inane. But it is obtuse even by the standards of the Center for American Progress. Big Oil and Big Natural Gas are one and the same. BP America is the largest producer of natural gas in the United States. Exxon Mobil owns the world’s largest privately-owned reserves of natural gas. Thus, by supporting multi-billion dollar taxpayer subsidies for natural gas, the Center for American Progress have convicted themselves of being in the pocket of the oil and gas industry. They are almost certainly being paid off by T. Boone Pickens to flack for the Pickens-Your-Pockets Plan.
On May 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (“USACE”) proposed new Guidance to clarify which waters of the United States are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act (“CWA”). If implemented as is, this Guidance document would increase significantly the authority of the federal government and it also would have a major economic impact. That is, it’s a major new policy. Yet it was never approved by the Congress. So it is another Obama power grab. (My colleague Marlo Lewis has covered extensively the EPA’s global warming power grab. Another colleague, Chris Horner, wrote a book on the subject.)
Unlike President Obama’s other power grabs, which are largely unprecedented, the history of federal jurisdiction under the CWA is characterized by the EPA and USACE seizing as much authority as they can. Therefore, the President’s Guidance document is taking a tradition of federal expansion to its extreme bounds. What follows is a primer that explains the context of President Obama’s Clean Water Act Guidance.
The National Chamber Foundation’s Campaign for Free Enterprise has announced that Jeffrey Immelt will be the keynote speaker at their Jobs for America Summit on July 11 at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, is America’s leading crony capitalist and promoter of cap-and-trade legislation. No word on whether the speakers will include fellow cap-and-trade promoters Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, and John Bryson, former CEO of Edison International, whom President Obama has nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. These proponents of energy-rationing polices are willing to raise energy prices and thereby make people poorer and destroy American jobs because they calculate that it will boost their companies’ profits.
In what is being described as an ambush, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has successfully forced a vote (next Tuesday, June 14) on legislation that would, upon July 1, terminate the ethanol tax credit and corresponding tariff. A back of the envelope calculation suggests it would save approximately $3 billion in the remainder of 2011.
According to the article, Coburn is cautiously optimistic that he has 60 votes. Politico gets it right, this is a big deal regardless if it passes:
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In Denial: Thomas Friedman’s (Self) Limits to (Intellectual) Growth
Michael Lynch, Master Resource, 10 June 2011
Need a Light Bulb? Uncle Sam Gets To Choose
Virginia Postrel, Bloomberg, 10 June 2011
Romney Was Right on Auto Bailout
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 9 June 2011
Here Comes Obama’s “Necessarily Skyrocket” Rules
Nicolas Loris, The Foundry, 9 June 2011
Where’s the Global Warming?
James Taylor, Forbes, 8 June 2011
File this one under regulatory trainwreck. NERA Economic Consulting has just published a study on the combined economic impacts of EPA’s Clean Air Transport (CATR) Rule and Utility Maximum Available Control Technology (MACT) Rule.
NERA estimates the rules will impose $184 billion in cumulative costs on the electricity sector, increase average U.S. electricity prices in 2016 by 12%, and reduce net U.S. employment by 1.4 million jobsduring 2013-2020.
“It is important to note that this report only covers CATR and Utility MACT,” comments Brandon Plank of the Republic Policy Committee. “It does not include the costs of EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, New Source Performance Standards for refineries and utilities, ozone and particulate matter standards, reclassification of coal ash, etc.” (See chart below.)
Here is the NERA study’s summary of key results: [click to continue…]
Liberal partisans claim that Republicans are at “war” with science, based largely on former President George W. Bush’s supposedly anti-science disposition, but they present only half the story. A strong case can be made that the Obama administration, too, is warring with science. Consider,
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Today The New York Times ran two dueling opinion pieces featuring Robert Bryce, author of a number of books, and Tom Friedman, who chose this column to unleash his inner Paul Ehrlich. The latter column will make regular NYT readers anxious and depressed, the former will make them angry.
Bryce argues that though wind and solar farms do not produce emissions, they require a whole lot of land, significant natural resource inputs, and new transmission lines. He believes that these shortfalls are under appreciated by renewable energy proponents, and the scaling of renewable energy might have other environmental consequences. California appears to have plenty of land, but that is to meet a 33% renewables goal, which is unlikely to satisfy environmentalists, and California has much more land than other states. The takeaway is that all energy choices have their tradeoffs:
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How long will scientists have to measure annual economic damages from hurricanes before they can confidently say that global warming is making storms stronger? In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed the evidence is already clear in the damage trends of the last several decades. But a new study finds that any warming-related increase in hurricane damages won’t be detectable for a century a more. [click to continue…]
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