In The National Review, T. Boone Pickens again makes the case for The NAT Gas Act of 2011. I slept through the first few paragraphs (the piece began with a constitutional argument).
There isn’t a whole lot of new information in here, its more of a response to the ongoing attacks on the legislation. He reminds us that Americans get all antsy when gas prices go up, but when prices drop again we are lulled back into indifference.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan recently took to the Huffington Post to promote subsidies for money-saving, “green” retrofits and appliances. While he never articulated why the Obama administration thinks American consumers are so stupid that they need government help in order to save money, Secretary Donovan did offer a nonsensical justification for these tax handouts. Here’s how he opened his HuffPo post,
“With gas prices topping $4 a gallon families and businesses are facing a real burden. But we can take action to ensure the American people don’t fall victim to volatile energy costs over the long term.”
There is a big problem with the Housing Secretary’s lede: Gasoline fuels cars, not houses. The fact that “gas prices [are] topping $4 a gallon” has almost nothing* to do with HUD’s wasteful green subsidies for energy efficient appliances and retrofits.
President Barack Obama this week nominated John Bryson to be Secretary of Commerce. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) immediately announced that he would try to defeat Bryson’s confirmation by the Senate. It’s easy to see why Inhofe didn’t have to spend much time weighing Bryson’s qualifications. Bryson is a model crony capitalist, lifelong professional environmentalist, and leading promoter of cap-and-trade legislation to raise energy prices.
Here is what Bryson said at a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009: “Greenhouse gas legislation – either with a tax or with a cap and trade, which is a more complicated way of getting at it, but it has the advantage politically of sort of hiding the fact that you have a tax, but at the same – you know that’s what you’re trying to do, trying to raise price of carbon….” He went on to say that the Waxman-Markey and other cap-and-trade bills in Congress would not raise energy prices enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the required amount, so that he also favored federal regulations, such as renewable requirements for electric utilities, on top of cap-and-trade. Later, Bryson referred to Waxman-Markey as a “moderate but acceptable bill.”
Aussie Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard is waging an aggressive PR campaign to sell carbon taxes in the Land Down Under. Resistance is fierce, with opposition leaders saying the tax “is so toxic that Labor MPs could dump her to save their own seats” (The Australian, June 3, 2011). [click to continue…]
The vote is 18 months away, but the politics of re-election already are having a major impact on the President’s environmental policy-making. In an effort to woo the American Heartland, President Barack Obama is (temporarily) reining in the Environmental Protection Agency. However, in those States where the President has no chance of victory in 2012, the regulatory steamroller proceeds apace.
Politico Morning Energy reported today that the President is signaling that he intends to delay the Environmental Protection Agency’s issuance of New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. They were supposed to have been issued in July. In essence, these NSPS standards act as the minimum threshold (the “floor”) for all pollution control mandates for greenhouse gas emissions from new coal power plants pursuant to the Clean Air Act. Although NSPS standards traditionally have applied only to new power plants, the Obama administration is interpreting the law creatively, so that it can regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, too.
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.”
PJM Interconnection is a regional transmission organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. My colleage, Troutman Sanders attorney Peter Glaser, just sent around a memo on the impacts of EPA’s regulatory surge on electricity prices. The memo is based on PJM auction reports (here and here).
Peter’s memo is too juicy not to share with a wider audience. I reproduce it below with his permission. — Marlo
Reality has interceded in EPA’s attempt to play down the impact of its train wreck regulations on the electric utility industry. First came the widely reported news that Louisville Gas & Electric had filed for a 19% rate increase by 2016 to pay for the upgrades that the regulations will require.
Now, we have the results of the capacity auction that PJM just conducted for the 2014-15 capacity year. The resulting capacity prices were about 4.5 to 8 times as high as prices paid in the last two auctions and 2.5 to 3 times as high as market analysts had predicted.
According to PJM, most of this increase can be laid at the feet of EPA. Based on PJM information, we calculate that the portion of the increase attributable to EPA will cost load (customers) in the PJM region $2-3 billion just in capacity costs and just for a one-year period (2014-15).
Here are the details.
General Wesley Clark and Congressmen Bruce Braley have teamed up with a Huffington Post op-ed to remind Americans that they still want you to care about those darned oil imports (we also import olive oil).
Right now, the United States has an addiction to foreign oil — an addiction that is not only crippling our economy, but is also funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign governments and corporations. It’s the biggest problem in America that no one seems serious about discussing and solving.
Part of breaking that habit is acknowledging just what kind of problem we have, and who benefits from it. That’s why we’ve been working together to build support for country-of-origin labeling at the pump — so that we know where that $4/gallon is coming from, and move beyond acknowledging our problem to solving it. [click to continue…]
Today, I participated in a telephone press conference on the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office and a proposed Clean Energy Deployment Administration. They are similar, in that they both are tasked with using taxpayer money to subsidize financing for “clean” energy sources. Each is intended to function like a green bank.
My colleagues on the call were: Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense; Henry Sokolski, Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center; Andrew Moylan, Vice President for Government Affairs at the National Taxpayers Union; and Jack Spencer, Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Here’s the attendant press release, with a link to audio from the press conference; here’s a coalition letter we (and others) signed to urge the Congress to shelve the proposed Clean Energy Deployment Administration, which is under consideration in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Below are my introductory remarks.
Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth bombarded audiences with image after image of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, and drought, creating the impression of a world in climate chaos. Gore blamed the alleged upsurge in extreme weather on global warming, that is, mankind’s sins of emission. One of Gore’s mighty pieces of evidence was a dramatic increase in insurance payments for weather-related damages. As he writes in his best-selling book of the same title:
Over the last three decades, insurance companies have seen a 15-fold increase in the amount of money paid to victims of extreme weather. Hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters have caused these losses [An Inconvenient Truth, p. 101].
Gore presented a chart similar to this one:
Seeing is believing, right? The problem, of course, is not merely that correlation (warmer weather/bigger losses) does not prove causation. More importantly, the economic data depicted in the chart have not been adjusted (“normalized”) to offset increases in population, wealth, and the consumer price index.
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