Yesterday I was invited on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, to participate on a panel about the President’s decision this week to punt (again) on the Keystone XL pipeline. Video is below. I’ve also included Al Jazeera’s write-up of the segment.
William Yeatman
The Environmental Protection Agency’s words and deeds are far apart when it comes to hydraulic fracturing, the technolution in natural gas drilling that has roughly doubled economically obtainable reserves of U.S. gas in only the last decade.
Last evening, Energy and Environment News PM (subscription required) reported that, “U.S. EPA wants to boost the public’s confidence in natural gas so production levels continue to rise, an agency official said today at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.”
Last month in Pavilion, Wyoming, however, EPA imparted the opposite. Far from “boosting the public’s confidence” in hydraulic fracturing (which now is virtually synonymous with the American gas industry), EPA perpetrated shoddy science in an effort to undercut the drilling technique’s public image.
Great news! Thanks to the technolution in oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing, natural gas prices are ultra-cheap. Because gas accounts for about 20 percent (and growing) of the U.S. electricity supply, its bottom-rock prices have diminished utility bills nationwide. According Bloomberg’s Julie Johnsson and Mark Chediak, “a shale-driven glut of natural gas has cut electricity prices for the U.S. power industry by 50 percent.”
Alas, it’s not great news for the entire country. In those regions that have most aggressively pushed intermittent and expensive renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, utility bills are heading north, despite the gas glut.
This week, for example, PG&E, which serves much of northern California, announced the first of two planned rate hikes this year. The utility has to raise prices to comply with all the green energy mandates coming out of Sacramento, where state lawmakers have long prided themselves on being the greenest in the nation.
Austin, Texas is a bastion of progressivism and the city government owns its own utility. Naturally, then, it has spared no expense in pursuing a green energy economy. Now, citizens are paying the bill: The city’s Electric Utility Commission is deliberating on a rate hike of almost $20 a month.
Notably, these two utilities use much more natural gas than renewable energy. Austin’s fuel generation mix for FY 2009 had 27 percent gas and 10 percent renewable. PG&E’s 2010 fuel mix included 20 percent gas and 16 percent renewable. Gas provides relatively more juice, and its price has plummeted, but wind and solar are so expensive, that electricity rates increase nonetheless!
Last week, my colleague Myron Ebell appeared for a lengthy interview on Al Jazeera, about how environmental policy will affect the 2012 elections. Watch the interview below.
Myron Ebell: Environmental issues and the 2012 election from CEI Video on Vimeo.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that the U.S. has overtaken China as the world’s most reckless energy investor. This race to the bottom will end poorly for both nations.
Since 2008, China has been global leader in government subsidies to renewable energy like solar and wind power. To be sure, the Chinese government isn’t investing in green energy for its people to use–China is building 1,000 megawatts of coal power every three weeks to satisfy the demand for electricity within its borders. Instead, these subsidies are meant primarily to spur the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines that are needed to meet Soviet-style green energy production quotas enacted by the U.S. and European countries. To put it another way, China is subsidizing the supply of green energy, while the U.S. and Europe are mandating its demand.
In the News
The Biggest Cost of EPA’s Climate Power Grab
Marlo Lewis, The Environmental Forum, January/February 2012
Moisturizing the EPA
R. J. Smith, American Spectator, 13 January 2012
Commerce Secretary Bryson Wants Higher Energy Prices
Iain Murray & David Bier, Washington Examiner, 13 January 2012
Why I Turned against “Green” Wind Power
Michael Morgan, Master Resource, 13 January 2012
Energy Department Makes More Bad Bets
Paul Chesser, National Legal and Policy Center, 13 January 2012
“Climate” and the Campaign
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 12 January 2012
Markey’s Misguided View of Energy Exports
Nicolas Loris, The Foundry, 12 January 2012
Please, Alarmists: Stop Denying Climate Change
James Taylor, Forbes, 12 January 2012
Chairman Chu’s Auto Show
Henry Payne, The Michigan View, 11 January 2012
Procrastinator-in-Chief Needs to Address Keystone XL
Rep. Lee Terry, The Hill, 11 January 2012
EPA’s War on Transparency
William Yeatman, GlobalWarming.org, 11 January 2012
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Not long ago, I blogged about how Energy Secretary Steven Chu was being unfairly scapegoated by the House of Representatives for the spectacular collapse of Solyndra. As I explained then, Members of Congress were the ones who passed the porkulus, a.k.a. the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which required the Department of Energy to spend almost $30 billion on “green jobs” as soon as possible. Moreover, the Energy Department received over 500 letters from Members of Congress on behalf of loan guarantee applicants (presumably constituents). In playing fast and loose on risky energy investments, Secretary Chu was following the Congress’s orders.
This week, the Congress further bolstered my defense of Secretary Chu. Today’s Politico Morning Energy reports:
The collapse of efforts in the House to save the uranium enrichment firm USEC through legislative tactics has left lawmakers in an awkward position with Energy Secretary Steven Chu: They need a favor. After legislators in both chambers raced — and ultimately failed — to insert measures into last month’s omnibus spending bill to prop up USEC’s multibillion-dollar American Centrifuge project in Piketon, Ohio, leaders in the House are now urging Chu to use his existing powers to help the project, according to a draft copy of a letter obtained by POLITICO.
According to the Hillsboro Times Gazette, the future of the American Centrifuge project depends on a $2 billion loan guarantee from the Energy Department Loan Programs Office (whence Solyndra). The deal was near completion at the end of the George W. Bush administration, and but it has been in a holding pattern under the Obama administration. Evidently, the U.S. Enrichment Corporation (USEC)—the parent company—cannot wait much longer for the loan to come through. BusinessWeek recently reported that USEC might have to lay off about 450 workers in Ohio, Tennessee and Maryland if uncertainty about funding meant it had to stop most activity on the project. That warning prompted a bipartisan push in the Congress last month to throw American Centrifuge a lifeline, in the form of a $150 million bailout, to keep it above water until the loan guarantee materializes.
Federal agencies are increasingly defining dry land as “wetlands” and “waters of the United States” based on sweepingly expansive interpretations of the Clean Water Act. They then send compliance orders to property owners, restricting use of their property. The test for what is a wetland has become so vague that owners often cannot figure out the status of their property without a court ruling. But the government claims that courts cannot decide this issue unless the owners first go through lengthy permit proceedings or unless they’ve been hit with potentially ruinous enforcement proceedings.
The government’s claim is now being contested in a case before the Supreme Court. In Sackett v. EPA case, landowners Mike and Chantell Sackett hoped to build a home on their half-acre lot in the Priest Lake area of Idaho’s Panhandle, but four years later found themselves in an unexpected legal battle with EPA. The agency claimed the property was a wetland even though it was in a residential neighborhood with houses on either side of it. EPA told the couple they would have to return the property to its original state and seek a costly development permit, or else be slapped with a fine in the tens of thousands of dollars. What’s more, the agency refused to grant the Sacketts a hearing on its ruling.
For a primer on the President’s Clean Water Act power grab, click here.
To read CEI’s amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to allow property owners to promptly contest federal agency directives imposing wetland restrictions on private land, click here.
Two nights ago on Glen Beck TV, CEI’s Chris Horner discussed the case. See video of his appearance below.
Since the late 1970s, California has prided itself as being a laboratory for progressive environmental policy. Not coincidentally, since the late 1970s, California’s once-mighty manufacturing sector has left the State.
I could care less about the California’s self-inflicted wounds, although I would find them humorous, all else being equal. Alas, I am forced to care, because the state’s massive Congressional delegation is adept at enacting federal laws that nationalize California’s boneheaded environmental standards. This is no laughing matter.
With this danger in mind, consider the first two paragraphs of an article published yesterday by Bloomberg, about California’s newly minted cap-and-trade scheme:
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