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 [...]
Ethanol “Blending Wall” Leads to Gas Exports
A recent WSJ article explained how the ethanol mandate is leading to a “blend wall” that paradoxically leads U.S. refiners to export their gasoline, raising pump prices at home. This is just another fantastic example of government policies having unintended consequences. Before looking at just how serious the problem is, let’s set the context by [...]
March 18, 2013 | Bus Tour, News, Renewable Fuel Standard
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
Deficit Reduction Through Energy Development
The new report from Joseph Mason, “Beyond the Congressional Budget Office,” explores the various ways that the CBO’s recent estimates vastly understate the economic activity and tax receipts that would be generated if the federal government merely got out of the way of the development of domestic oil and gas resources. In the present [...]
Fracking and Federalism
A funny thing has happened in the fracking wars: All of a sudden, the interventionist groups who are usually fans of centralized power—such as having the federal government issue edicts on carbon emissions—all of a sudden have discovered the virtues of federalism. Specifically, they don’t want state governments limiting the ability of local governments [...]
Even With PTC, America’s Largest Wind Company Forecasts ‘A Down Year’ in 2013
During the debate to retain the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) last year, wind advocates offered a variety of spurious claims in an intense lobbying effort to keep the favorable tax treatment. In one case, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) warned that new wind installations would decline precipitously if Congress allowed the PTC [...]
Why are oil imports falling?
A recent article in the Washington Post proclaims that U.S. oil imports are falling to their lowest level since 1987. The decrease in imports is a combination of two things, Americans using less oil because of an economic downturn and increased domestic production. The increase in domestic production can be attributed to the increased [...]
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
