[N.B. Ex-Vice President and massive carbon “polluter” Al Gore took to the pages of last week’s Rolling Stone in order to critique President Barack Obama’s supposedly timid response to global warming. This is Part 2 of a multipart series on the policy distortions peddled by Mr. Gore in the piece.]
Regarding the influence of special interests on climate policy, Mr. Gore wrote,
…a badly broken Senate that is almost completely paralyzed by the threat of filibuster and is controlled lock, stock and barrel by the oil and coal industries; a contingent of nominal supporters in Congress who are indentured servants of the same special interests that control most of the Republican Party…
… don’t give up on the political system. Even though it is rigged by special interests…
Mr. Gore would have you believe that his preferred climate policy, a cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme, failed due to opposition from hydrocarbon special interests. This is not true. In fact, cap-and-trade bills in the 110th and 111th Congresses were voted down by bi-partisan majorities of lawmakers, for a very simple reason: These politicians didn’t want to lose their jobs by enacting an energy tax and thereby angering their constituents, the preponderance of whom had (and continue to have) bigger concerns (read: jobs) than global warming, no matter how much Mr. Gore tried (and continues to try) to alarm them by blaming every disaster in the news—Floods! Droughts! Heat waves! Snow storms!—on climate change. That is, the failure of cap-and-trade in the Congress has little to do with hydrocarbon energy lobbies, and everything to do with the fact that Americans don’t want energy-rationing because they aren’t alarmed. Rightfully so.
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Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) are planning to introduce their version of the T. Boone Pickens Earmark bill this week. Rep. John Sullivan (R-Okla.) released a list of 220 supporters of the Pickens-Your-Pocket Plan, which is H. R. 1380 in the House. The list is mostly companies, many of them small to medium in size, that hope to benefit from federal subsidies for natural gas vehicles and infrastructure.
It looks now like a failing effort. The pushback from free market and conservative groups has made a substantial dent in enthusiasm. Fourteen Republicans in the House have withdrawn their names as co-sponsors. That leaves 182 co-sponsors currently.
Here is the list of the Representatives who have gotten off the Boonedoggle Bandwagon: Steve Pearce (R-NM), Todd Akin (R-Mo), Glenn Thompson (R-Penna), Tim Griffin (R-Ark), Cory Gardner (R-Colo), Scott Tipton (R-Colo), Mike Coffman (R-Colo), Larry Bucshon (R-Ind), John Kline (R-Minn), Mike Kelly (R-Penna), Scott Rigell (R-Va), Blake Farenthold (R-Tex), Richard Nugent (R-Fla), and Joseph Pitts (R-Penna).
This post updates my June 14 post on the mantra intoned by EPA, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that EPA/CARB’s greenhouse gas (GHG) motor vehicle emission standards are “harmonized and consistent” with NHTSA’s fuel economy standards.
EPA Associate Administrator David McIntosh recently sent written responses to questions from House Energy and Commerce Committee members following up on a May 5, 2011 hearing entitled “The American Energy Initiative.”
In a nutshell, EPA defines “harmonized and consistent” as “whatever we say it is.” [click to continue…]
I’ve previously reported (see here and here) on the environmental industry’s movement’s war on bunker fuel, the heavy fuel used by large ships around the world. The modus operandi of the enviros is to pursue and convince regulators, such as the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization (IMO) or California’s Air Resources Board (CARB), to push for a targeted patchwork of prohibitions and/or mandating low-sulfur fuel-switching, enacting stricter speed limits in near-shore shipping lanes, restricting on-ship power generation when in port, and imposing emissions taxes.
A couple of years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was toying with the idea of calling for strict and extremely costly regulations or a federal ban on bunker fuel -carrying or -using ships within U.S. waters, only to be shouted down by politicians and citizens from states with large maritime sectors. But California, a state not known to back down from adopting stupid environmental regulations, moved forward in the war on bunker fuel and international trade and set its own regulations on fuel use and petroleum conveyance in the maritime industry operating within the state’s waters.
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We recently posted about the EPA’s decision to reduce the cellulosic ethanol blending requirement from 500 million gallons in 2012 to somewhere between 3.45-12.9 million gallons, which is 0.69- 2.5 percent of the original “mandate.”
Via Greenwire ($ubscription required), we see that refiners are still required to purchase “credits” from EPA indicating that they are complying with the mandate, despite its impossibility:
The proposal fine-tunes blending mandates for 2012 called for by the federal renewable fuel standard, and EPA said yesterday it expects to require a total use of between 3.45 million and 12.9 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels next year. Officials said the final figure could come out to more or less than the 6.6 million gallons required in 2011.
Charles Drevna, president of NPRA, said given that EPA’s own data show the ethanol industry has produced no qualifying fuel in the past year, the requirement for blenders to either use the fuel or pay EPA about $1 per gallon for a credit makes no sense. [click to continue…]
Yesterday morning, the Energy Opportunity program at the Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank, held a panel on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed “Utility MACT” rule to regulate coal- and oil-fired power plants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. This rule, if implemented, would be one of the costliest regulations, ever, and its primary justification is to protect pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen from the deposition onto inland, freshwater bodies of mercury emitted from American power plants. Notably, U.S. power plants contribute 2 percent of total mercury deposition across America, so they are a rather small component of this supposed problem. In future posts, I’ll contend that there are more reasonable methods of protecting the scores (hundreds?) of pregnant women who are also subsistence fishers, other than overhauling the electricity generation industry at a cost of $10 billion annually (EPA’s estimate) to $100 billion annually (industry’s estimate). In this post, I only want to note how extraordinarily unfair and unbalanced was the Center for American Progress’s panel yesterday. Consider the panelists:
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Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on carbon dioxide provided some welcome relief to those concerned that the Court might say something, deliberately or otherwise, that would buttress the claims of global warming alarmists. The Court said no such thing. In fact, it seemed to step back from the suggestions in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA ruling that the scientific debate over anthropogenic warming had largely been settled. Yesterday’s ruling does mention hurricanes and heat-related deaths and melting ice-caps, but only in characterizing EPA’s view of global warming, not the Court’s. And the Court quickly distances itself from EPA’s views with an interesting footnote:
“For views opposing EPA’s, see, e.g., Dawidoff, The Civil Heretic, N. Y. Times Magazine 32 (March 29, 2009). The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.”
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Today the EPA announced its proposed 2012 Renewable Fuel Standard requirements:
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) established the annual renewable fuel volume targets, which steadily increase to an overall level of 36 billion gallons in 2022. To achieve these volumes, EPA calculates a percentage-based standard for the following year. Based on the standard, each refiner, importer, and non-oxygenate blender of gasoline or diesel determines the minimum volume of renewable fuel that it must ensure is used in its transportation fuel.
The proposed 2012 overall volumes and standards are:
Biomass-based diesel (1.0 billion gallons; 0.91 percent)
Advanced biofuels (2.0 billion gallons; 1.21 percent)
Cellulosic biofuels (3.45 – 12.9 million gallons; 0.002 – 0.010 percent)
Total renewable fuels (15.2 billion gallons; 9.21 percent) [click to continue…]
In mid-April, I testified before a Colorado Senate Committee that was considering whether to approve a Regional Haze State Implementation Plan (“RHSIP”) to improve visibility at National Parks. The purpose of my testimony was to inform Committee Members that the RHSIP before them violated Colorado’s statutory prohibition on pollution controls pursuant to the Clean Air Act that are more stringent than what the federal government requires. That is, I told them that the RHSIP was illegal. I explained to the Senators that correcting the illegal components of the RHSIP would save Colorado ratepayers more than $120 million. (For background on the RHSIP, click here. Video of my testimony is available here.)
The Committee heard an entirely different story from lawyers representing natural gas producers, Xcel Energy, and environmentalist ex-Governor Bill Ritter. These lawyers’ clients were staunch proponents of the RHSIP, because it included a strategy to switch fuels from coal to natural gas for almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity. For the gas and utility sector, billions of dollars were at stake; for ex-Governor Ritter, the fuel switching plan enhanced his national profile among environmentalists. These special interest lawyers refused to address my allegations of illegality (because I was right). Instead, they told the Committee that unless the General Assembly approved the RHSIP immediately and without alteration, the federal government would swoop in and usurp Colorado’s air quality planning authority.
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In a Saturday editorial, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praised new GM CEO Dan Akerson for his “audacious” support of a gas tax. Wrote the editorial board,
Perhaps because Mr. Akerson comes from outside the sometimes insular Detroit auto culture, he can see more clearly that the domestic industry’s old ways won’t work any longer. One of the cardinal principles of both business and evolution is: Adapt or die.
Two years ago, the nation saved GM. The audacious idea from the company’s new chief might help return the favor.
This is malarkey. Mr. Akerson’s “audacious” effort to “adapt or die” is in fact only the latest toss in a long running game of hot potato between the oil industry and the auto industry. Here’s how it works: The auto industry tries to avoid more stringent federal fuel efficiency standards by pushing for a gas tax, while the oil industry tries to avoid a gas tax by pushing for more stringent federal fuel efficiency standards.
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