“All Americans are involved in making energy policy. When individual choices are made with a maximum of personal understanding and a minimum of government restraints, the result is the most appropriate energy policy.”
– Reagan Administration Energy Plan (1981)
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) oversees nuclear weapons sites and subsidizes conventional and alternative fuels. The department has a history of fiscal and environmental mismanagement. Further, misguided energy regulations have caused large loses to consumers and the economy over the decades.
DOE will spend about $45 billion in 2011, or about $380 per U.S. household. It employs about 17,000 workers directly and oversees 100,000 contract workers at 21 national laboratories and other facilities across the nation. The department operates 37 different subsidy programs.
Spending Cuts
Department of Energy research activities should be terminated.…
Word on the political street is that a 15 cent increase in the federal gasoline tax may well be included in the final draft of a bill being prepared by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and John Kerry (D-MA) to address global warming. Shell, British Petroleum, and ConocoPhillips – are said to support the tax because it’s a less costly intervention in the transportation fuel market (for them anyway) than alternative interventions that might otherwise find their way into this prospective legislation. Shell et al. may be right about that, but be that as it may, this would still constitute lousy public policy. A gasoline tax hike ought to be resisted.
Higher Taxes Will Not Alter Climate Under Anyone’s Math
The proposed gasoline tax increase will have no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions. …
My post the other day on nuclear power prompted a number of comments – most of them hostile. Because the comments offered were fairly standard-issue arguments that one often hears in the debate about nuclear energy, it’s worth surveying them seriously.
Markets Schmarkets
One argument often heard is that market actions are not indicative of economic merit. Rod Adams, for instance, writes:
…Markets dominated by people whose only motive is making more money are not the best decision makers – the people making the decisions in that situation will often decide to influence the law of supply and demand by keeping their hands on the levers that they can use to keep supply restrained. If their hands are “invisible” it is because they work at keeping them hidden or because observers and academic study producers do not work very hard to find them.