“Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”
– Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), four years ago.
The American Automobile Association predicts that 39.3 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, a million more this year than last. Affordable, reliable, widely available gasoline and diesel is a big reason. And maybe Americans feel energy-liberated by the current Administration.
While we wait for the anti-energy, glass-emptying Center for American Progress (not Prosperity) to psychologically retool, the rest of us can be optimistic.
“The [1993] ‘Broad Based Energy Tax,’ or Btu tax, proposed in 1993 would have imposed a tax ranging from $0.257 to $0.599 per million Btu on coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, and electricity from hydropower. The tax would not have been imposed on non-hydro renewable energy sources.”
Tributes to the late Glenn R. Schleede this week (here and here) are joined by a piece published in Regulation magazine, published in 2000 by the Cato Institute. “The Backdoor Btu Tax” can apply to a variety of government interventions in the energy economy.
“Political ideas never die, however, they just come back in different forms,” Schleede reminds us. And so hold on to your wallets whenever reading about and analyzing the latest about mandates and rationing schemes with oil, gas, coal, or electricity.
…“The U.S. Energy Information Administration has come a long way in the quality of its analysis since Glenn, independent of any organization other than his own, launched critiques of the federal agency. I wouldn’t say that Glenn alone changed the EIA, but everyone knew there was an aggressive watchdog keeping a close eye on EIA’s work.”
To say that Glenn Schleede was opposed to taxpayer-funded renewables projects — especially wind power — is akin to saying the Washington Monument is a building.
Both statements are true, but both vastly understate reality.
Glenn, who died on May 7 at 83, was an energy analyst, federal official and utility executive — and a virtual vacuum cleaner for collecting data and policy analysis.
Over the past two decades, he was particularly outspoken about his dislike for wind power and taxpayer subsidies for what he considered to be an uneconomic technology.
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