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:
House Majority Leader John Boehner said in a statement yesterday that he will continue to support a Republican proposal that would tie expanded energy production on federal lands and in offshore areas to highway funding: “In the coming weeks and months, the House will take action on the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, which will link expanded American energy production to high-priority infrastructure projects like roads and bridges in order to create more jobs.” We previously noted this development here on GlobalWarming.org in November. I had been holding out hope that House GOP leadership would adopt a New Year’s resolution disavowing this flawed proposal… unfortunately, here we are.
In December, National Review Online published a brief op-ed of mine explaining the problems with “drilling for roads” and the danger such a funding mechanism would pose to the Highway Trust Fund:
Barack Obama swept into the Presidency promising a new political order, one characterized by “transparency” and “openness.” Three years later, the President’s lofty campaign promises are belied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s record of suppression.
Federal agencies cannot issue regulations willy-nilly; rather, they are bound to rules stipulating administrative procedure, in order to ensure the voice of affected parties is heard. Obama’s EPA, however, evinces a troubling tendency to circumvent these procedural rules. Regulated entities are being subjected to controversial, onerous regimes, before they even have the opportunity to read the rules, much less voice an objection. The wayward Agency is exercising an unanswerable power, straight out of a Kafka novella.
Former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus’s conclusion to his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles at first doesn’t seem like it directly pertains to environmental or energy issues at all, but most profoundly does. His argument strikes at the heart of environmentalist arguments for energy regulation, rationing, public planning, and other environmentalist agendas. While he doesn’t deny that environmental problems exist, he answers the question “What to do?” much differently than an environmentalist would.
Blue Planet in Green Shackles was published by CEI in 2008
What to do? The first, and in fact, the only reasonable answer to the question is “nothing,” or rather “nothing special.” It is necessary to let the spontaneity of human activity—unrestrained by any missionaries of absolute truths—take its course, or else everything will get worse. The aggregate outcome of independent actions of millions of informed and rational individuals—unorganized by any genius or dictator—is infinitely better than any deliberate attempt to design the development of human society.
Communism demonstrated that megalomaniac human ambitions, immodesty, and lack of humility always have a bad end. Although the system of human society is to some extent robust, although it has its natural defense mechanisms and can bear a lot (just as nature itself can), every attempt to command the wind and the rain has so far always turned out to be very costly and ineffective in the long term and to have devastating effects on freedom. The attempts of environmentalists cannot lead to different ends. In any complex system (such as human society, economy, language, legal system, nature, or climate), every such attempt is doomed to failure. Humankind has already had this experience and—together with the various “revolts of the masses”—again and again has tried to forget it.
Socialists and environmentalists have usually believed that the more complex a system, the less it can be left to itself and the more it has to be masterminded, regulated, planned, and designed. That belief is not true. Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and the whole Austrian school of economics have—for some, perhaps a bit counterintuitively—demonstrated that just the opposite is the case. It is possible to control and design only simple systems, no complex ones.
A topic CEI has written about frequently gets covered in The New York Times, the bizarre requirement by the EPA that refiners spend up to $7 million on ghost “credits” from the EPA in lieu of purchasing cellulosic ethanol, which doesn’t exist:
When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.
But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.
That’s a good summary. Let’s look at one specific paragraph, where the coverage borders on editorializing in support of an agency under attack by the right:
Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seem harsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.
Congratulations on winning the Iowa Caucus! I know you have worked long and hard for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
On the night of the caucuses, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS), was heard saying: “Republicans, in general, aren’t enthusiastic about any of their choices.” This is clear as evidenced by the search for the “not Romney” candidate.
While DWS was correct, one thing all Republicans are enthusiastic about is beating President Obama. They will unite behind that cause. If you are to be the candidate who unites the Republican Party, you are going to have to differentiate yourself from President Obama to win support beyond Iowa. You’ve got several problems there.
One problem is your view on manmade climate change. The American public doesn’t view global warming as an important issue—this is especially true for Republicans. Yet President Obama continues to tout green jobs. In the name of saving the planet, his administration’s policies are making it difficult for people to feed their families and heat their homes.
Last week on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Cavuto, my colleague Chris Horner discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental justice” grants. Horner’s thesis is that these grants are used to “teach people to oppose economic activity in the areas where they most need economic activity.” See the whole segment:
Just a few days after our previous post outlining the ethanol industry’s brave, unprecedented, legendary, and 100% voluntary decision to give up the ethanol tax credit, we see that there are still other subsidies that they are interested in keeping:
But the head of the Renewable Fuels Association—Bob Dinneen—says the industry will work to ensure that tax credits for cellulosic ethanol will continue past the end of 2012.
“We think that the production tax credit and the depreciation that is now allowed for cellulose needs to continue,” Dinneen says.
Extension of the cellulosic tax credits will send an important signal to the marketplace and encourage investment in the next generation of ethanol technology, Dinneen says.
And to those who consider it just another federal subsidy for ethanol…
“They need only look at the tax incentive for grain-based ethanol that has just expired–that demonstrates you don’t need a tax incentive forever,” Dinneen says.
“You need to encourage investment—convince the marketplace that there is going to be consistent government support that will allow the industry to get on its feet.”
Cellulosic ethanol has not yet been produced commercially, but according to the U.S. Department of Energy web site, several commercial cellulosic plants are under construction.
In this excerpt from his new book The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World, energy expert Daniel Yergin explains why technology continues to thwart doomsayers who claims the world will run out of oil. He shows how technology transformed the energy industry and just in time for the rising worldwide demand.
The Quest was released in 2011
[In the 1990s], technology was increasing the security of oil supplies–by expanding the range of the drill bit and increasing recoverable reserves. The petroleum industry was going through a period of innovation, capitalizing on the advances in communications, computers, and information technology to find resources and develop them, whether on land or farther and farther out into the sea.
So often, over the history of the oil industry, it is said that technology has gone about as far as it can and that the “end of the road” for the oil industry is in sight. And the, new innovations dramatically expand capabilities. This pattern would be repeated again and again.
The rapid advances in microprocessing made possible the analysis of vastly more data, enabling geophycists to greatly improve their interpretation of underground structures and thus improve exploration success. Enhanced computing power meant that the seismic mapping of the underground structures–the strata, the faults, the cap rocks, the traps–could now be done in three dimensions, rather than two. This 3-D seismic mapping, though far from infallible, enabled explorationists to much improve their understanding of the geology deep underground.
The second advance was the advent of horizontal drilling. Instead of the traditional vertical well that went straight down, wells could now be drilled vertically for the first few thousand feet and then driven at an angle or even sideways with drilling progress tightly controlled and measured every few feet with very sophisticated tools. This meant that much more of the reservoir could be accessed, thus increasing production.
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