“We in the petroleum industry are not dismissing the global climate change issue. But I don’t believe anyone should have the moral authority to deny people the opportunity to improve their way in life by arbitrarily depriving them of the means…. I hope that the governments of this region will work with us to resist policies that could strangle economic growth.”
– Lee Raymond, CEO, ExxonMobil (2010) [1]
Think Progress (the successor to the Joe Romm-founded Climate Progress at the Center for American Progress) published a recent piece by Mark Hand, “Industry Opposition Leads ALEC to Withdraw Anti-Climate Resolution,” subtitled “Right-wing lobbying group fails to pass resolution targeting EPA finding.”
Some excerpts from Hand’s piece follow:
… Continue ReadingA secretive right-wing lobbying group failed to pass a resolution this week that called upon the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are endangering the planet.
“Dense mineral energies can be considered more environmentally benign than dilute, intermittent renewables. Peter Huber has written that ‘the greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt.’ He notes that ‘extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption’.”
Letters-to-the-editor are an effective way to communicate ideas. They are brief and to the point, appealing to the shortened attention spans that most readers have experienced.
Letter writing can be the best return on a policy writer’s investment. The King of the practice is Donald Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University (see his many titles and affiliations here).
Through the years, I have published several letters in the Wall Street Journal.…
Continue Reading“Energy tax preferences represent governmental intervention in markets; they are designed to direct private investment away from some activities to activities favored by the tax preference(s).”
” … tax preferences represent the government’s attempt to take resources from some parties in the energy sector and reallocate them to other parties in the energy sector.”
” … the best remedy for excessive corporate income tax burdens is a direct reform of the corporate income tax. Targeted tax preferences to moderate industry tax burdens are a poor way to address the problem.”
– Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, Letter to Energy Energy Tax Reform Working Group, House Ways and Means Committee [chair: Kevin Brady (R-Texas)], April 15, 2013.
Several years ago, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute wrote a tax policy missive to the Energy Tax Reform Working Group of the House Ways and Means Committee.