Over at Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), where oil production and oil consumption are considered bads, Memorial Day is not a welcomed time. And so their holiday-weekend message is that oil is not a good buy (it is more expensive thanks to the policies CAP/CP advocate), and “Big Oil” is a culprit. Here is their spin:
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.
At MasterResource, we celebrate the beginning of the peak driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability.…
“A carbon tax would have a net negative effect on consumption, investment and jobs, resulting in lower federal revenues from taxes on capital and labor. Any revenue raised by a carbon tax would be far outweighed by the negative impacts to the overall economy.”
Pricing carbon dioxide (CO2) to wring competitive advantage and to appease environmental pressure groups once drew notable business support from the big players, such as Ken Lay’s Enron and John Browne’s BP. But not from Lee Raymond’s Exxon Mobil, although Rex Tillerson’s Exxon Mobil supports a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade.
But presumably, as a key member of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), Exxon Mobil is opposed to a carbon tax in the current political environment. Another big energy and political player, Dow Chemical, which dropped out of NAM on the gas export issue, is against a carbon tax judging from its Australian experience.…
The Sierra Club, as yesterday’s post described, has ditched its previous support for natural gas, the cleanest burning fossil fuel. And so goes the modern, Washington, DC-based environmental pressure group movement, rejecting not only oil, gas, and coal but also nuclear, hydro, and most biofuels. Translated into today’s energy usage, some 98 percent is bad and 2 percent good. [1]
Turning an industrial economy over to the two most costly, unreliable (intermittent) energy resources–solar and wind–is a lights out, engine stall strategy for a modern industrial economy.
Where does such anti-industrial, anti-human, coercionist thinking come from? The answer is the deep ecology movement.
“Deep Ecology”
As mentioned yesterday, a radical wing of the modern environmental movement rejects a human-centered anthropocentric view of the world in favor of a nature-first ecocentric view.…