The ironic thing in the debate over carbon policies is that opponents of massive new federal taxes and regulations don’t need to go to obscure websites or ideological Think Tanks to get their talking points. On the contrary, those of us who are very wary of giving the government more power over the entire energy [...]
Beware of the Stealthy Carbon Tax
June 14, 2013 | Bus Tour, Emissions Standards, Facts, Greenhouse Gases, News, Threats
Tesla Repays Feds, Should Thank Competitors for Success
Tesla Motors repayed a $465 million dollar loan from the federal government yesterday, nine years ahead of schedule. While being touted as a major success for the future of renewable energy and Zero Emissions Vehicles in particular, the truth behind Tesla’s façade of success is worrisome. The company’s first profitable quarter demonstrates the difficulty of [...]
Drawing the Wrong Line in the Sand
The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert recently published a comment entitled “Lines in the Sand,” arguing that President Obama should not approve the Keystone XL pipeline because of the climate impacts of using oil. Kolbert’s argument is flawed for multiple reasons including the fact that she fails to consider the actual climate impact and the [...]
Ethanol Mandates Distort Corn Market
A recent Bloomberg article underscores the government distortions in the fuel and food sectors. The piece discusses the rising price of ethanol because of expected supply problems: Ethanol’s discount to gasoline narrowed to a four-month low on speculation that the slowest pace of corn planting since 1986 will make it difficult to replenish supplies. The [...]
May 3, 2013 | Bus Tour, Facts, News, Renewable Fuel Standard, Threats
New Study on the Impact of RFS Implies There Is No Need for the RFS
Earlier this week, the Renewable Fuels Association released a report arguing that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is only slightly raising gasoline prices. The implication of the report is clear—there is no need for RFS. If the RFS has positive benefits, as the report claims, or only slight costs, then there is no need [...]
March 29, 2013 | Bus Tour, Facts, News, Renewable Fuel Standard
Senator Whitehouse’s Duplicitous Carbon Tax Amendment
Last weekend the Senate rejected an amendment to the FY 2014 budget that would have enacted a carbon tax. For those interested in affordable energy and job creation, this was a good thing. Still, it’s worth walking through the actual wording of Senator Whitehouse’s amendment to see just how duplicitous it was. Even if someone [...]
March 26, 2013 | Bus Tour, Emissions Standards, Facts, Greenhouse Gases, News, Threats
Everybody Agrees that CAFE Standards Are Inefficient
Often in the policy debates on government regulations, you will have free-market people decrying inefficient impediments to business, while the other side will tout the (alleged) benefits to the environment or whatever the social goal happens to be. Yet a new MIT study—from a group that is very sympathetic to carbon regulatory policies—documents how inefficient [...]
March 6, 2013 | Bus Tour, Corporate Average Fuel Economy, Facts, News, Threats
Boxer-Sanders Carbon “Fee” Relies on Huge Bait-and-Switch
A recent story in EnergyGuardian (sub. req’d) centered on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) support for the carbon “fee” bill introduced by his colleagues Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Fortunately, the newly-released NERA study gives us a quantitative estimate of how much their scheme would hurt the U.S. economy. The whole episode fulfills the [...]
February 28, 2013 | Bus Tour, Emissions Standards, Facts, Greenhouse Gases, News, Threats
New NERA Study Shows Economic Dangers of a Carbon Tax
A new study by NERA Economic Consulting, prepared for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), documents the economic dangers of a federal carbon tax. The study is very conservative in its assumptions (as I’ll explain below), giving the benefit of the doubt to the proponents of a carbon tax. Even so, there study reaches two [...]
February 28, 2013 | Bus Tour, Emissions Standards, Facts, Greenhouse Gases, News, Threats
Regulating “Particulate Matter”: The EPA Doesn’t Even Believe Its Own Bogus Numbers
People who have watched environmental policy debates soon learn that the alarmist interventionists—the ones claiming that the government needs to act quickly in order to prevent catastrophe—are not afraid to throw around terrifying statistics that are absurd on their face. In a different forum, I walked through this phenomenon when it came to proposed regulations [...]
January 25, 2013 | Emissions Standards, Facts, Maximum Achievable Control Technology Standards, News
