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The Competitive Enterprise Institute today reacted to President Barack Obama’s decision to block construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline by urging the House of Representatives to revive legislation that would take the decision out of the President’s hands and direct a federal agency to permit the project. The 1700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline would move over half a million barrels of oil a day from Canada’s Alberta province and from the Bakken Field in North Dakota to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
“We urge the House of Representatives to include a provision in the payroll tax cut extension bill that must be enacted by the end of February that would require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to permit the project within thirty days,” said Myron Ebell, Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “As oil production in Venezuela and Mexico likely declines dramatically in the next few years, the Obama Administration’s claim that importing more oil from Canada is not in the national interest is preposterous.”
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!
In her new book Energy Freedom: The role of energy in your life & how environmentalists control its use, Marita Noon gives a down-to-earth explanation of energy and environmentalism. In this passage, she explains how energy makes our lives comfortable.
Energy Freedom was released in 2012
“Greed is good” was far more than a catch phrase made part of the vernacular through the popular late ‘80s movie Wall Street. As is often the case, art imitates life. “Greed is good” was more than a line from a movie; it was the mantra of the times. However, as Gordon Gecko, the famed character played by Michael Douglas, found out, too much greed was not good. His tactics sent him away for twenty years.
Today, in an age of simplicity and even austerity, “greed is good” sounds horribly outdated. Replacing it would be the slogan, “green is good.” Anything or anyone who can label one’s self as “green” has a perceived marketing advantage. Without fully understanding the implications of “green,” people support the “green” concept as generally being better for the environment. Without a specific universal definition of “green,” products as diverse as political candidates, diapers, and cars proudly sport the moniker. Though like Gordon Gecko learned, it is possible to have too much. Blind adoption of concepts labeled “green” may imprison America for the next twenty years or more. Resources, which America needs to move forward, are being locked up.
The resources I am referring to are energy, specifically oil, gas, coal, and uranium—the essential ingredients that fuel America. But other natural resources are also a part of what supplies our energy. We need copper for wires in transmission lines. Sulfur, lead, lithium, and rare earths are needed for batteries—and these resources, too, are being locked up. While most people think of gasoline and/or electricity when they think of energy, if they think about it at all, there is much more involved.
A Christian minister’s zeal in Pennsylvania to save Mother Earth from the indignities of hydraulic fracturing has caused her to go a bit too far. Claiming that Jesus would oppose all fracking, the Rev. Leah Schade told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “God put human beings into the Garden to till it and keep it, not drill and poison it.”
The Rev. Schade overlooks the fact that we’re no longer living in the Garden of Eden, but in a world in which the hunter-gatherer lifestyle really won’t work for most people. If Jesus really wants us not to disturb the ground, then there goes industrial civilization, which is based on digging stuff up.
(By the way, the Tribune-Review article describes the Rev. Schade as being a Lutheran pastor and also as ministering to a United Church of Christ congregation in Union County, Pennsylvania. The United Church of Christ is the major denomination of Congregationalists, whose roots go back to the Calvinism of New England’s Puritan settlers, not to Martin Luther. The green religion has taken hold in both Congregationalism and Lutheranism, as it has in many branches of Christianity.)
Iain Murray and I had an article in the Sacramento Bee this weekend that highlighted President Obama’s persistent attempts to keep his environmental agenda as secret as possible. This war on environmental transparency is an issue that globalwarming.org has been covering, notably here and here. Below is the article in its entirety.
When Vice President Dick Cheney held secret meetings for his energy task force in the early days of President George W. Bush’s first term, he was excoriated by the left and even some on the right. Both Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued, but the Supreme Court found the proceedings were protected by executive privilege.
President Barack Obama came into office pledging to end such secrecy, saying, “The way to make government accountable is to make it transparent.”
On his own energy agenda, however, the president has been as opaque as Cheney, repeatedly holding closed-door meetings, anonymously courting lobbyists, dodging Freedom of Information Act requests, and ignoring subpoenas from Congress.
Folks who stop at a slot machine in the Las Vegas airport between flights can usually risk the few dollars that will probably disappear, but the serious gambler—whether the stock market, the ponies, or cards—assesses the risk before they cash in their chips. Even then, they make miscalculations. That’s why they call it gambling.
Last week, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund miscounted his cards when he claimed that new EPA regulations will “protect the IQ of countless of American kids and help clear the air for millions of Americans with asthma.” Citing the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards the EPA rolled out on December 21, that he said was 21 years in the making, his widely-published op-ed said that the US “has always had good sense when taking on hazardous substances in our environment.”
The first card Krupp lays down in support of his argument that the U.S. has “good sense” is DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)—which the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) cofounder, Victor Yannacone, was instrumental in banning back in 1972. Using DDT as an example of “good sense,” Krupp says it was banned “after learning that the pesticide was killing birds of prey.” Even though the EDF sprang up in the late sixties with the single purpose of battling the use of DDT, it is surprising that he is still trying this old trick.
In Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health, CEI’s John Berlau describes how environmentalists have intervened in the economy in ways that have caused many deaths. In this passage, he criticizes the precautionary principle, the idea that the government should wait to be absolutely certain before it permits the use of certain products.
Eco-Freaks was published in 2006
Today’s environmentalists wax eloquently about the Precautionary Principle. In green manifestos like the Wingspread Consensus, they argue that if there is any doubt about a certain chemical’s effects, it should not be introduced. Advocates liken it to the adage, “Look before you leap.” But, points out science writer Ronald Bailey, the principle goes against another wise adage, “He who hesitates is lost.”
Imagine if the army had followed the Precautionary Principle of today’s advocates. The military and drug companies did do some tests and found that DDT posed no harm to humans, but they could not be certain. But, had DDT not been used in World War II, millions of soldiers, civilians, and Holocaust victims would have died of insect-borne diseases. When talking to students, Gloria Lyon expresses a principle similar to that stated by University of Texas environmental law professor Frank Cross, that in protecting public health, “there is no such thing as a risk-free lunch.”
Chemical pioneer Joseph Jacobs was also critical of the Precautionary Principle. He noted that one of the products he helped develop saved many lives, but also “caused quite a few deaths.” But this substance was not DDT. It was penicillin, which has caused allergic fatalities. No deaths of humans, by contrast, have been linked to DDT. Yet “no one has ever bemoaned the discovery of penicillin or caused it to be banned,” Jacobs wrote. “If this had been given the Rachel Carson treatment, think of all the lives which would no t have been saved.”
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.
“Ethanol ventures backed by billionaire entrepreneur Vinod Khosla — including Range Fuels, which built a failed factory in Georgia — were given the green light for an estimated $600 million in federal and state subsidies,” reports The Atlanta Journal- Constitution,
Yet,” the AJC article continues, “none of the dozen or so companies financed or controlled by Khosla over the last decade has produced commercially viable [cellulosic] ethanol. Some failed or, hamstrung by unproven technology and insufficient capital, remain behind schedule.”
The cost to taxpayers? “To date, the companies have tapped about $250 million of the $600 million. Even though they are now unlikely to ever receive the full amounts, tens of millions have been lost.”
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