Many analysts (including myself) have written about the innumerable problems with cap-and-trade, mostly focusing on the bogus nature of the trade. And most of the problems we’ve predicted have found their way into the current cap-and-trade law working its way through Congress, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Waxman-Markey climate bill).
As was widely predicted, Waxman-Markey has degenerated into little more than a special-interest pork-fest, where the political system is getting ready to give away at least 85% of the valuable emission permits to favored energy constituencies such as electrical utilities, university researchers, low-income households, renewable manufacturers, anti-deforestation programs, and so on. The Obama administration’s pledge to auction off 100% of the emission permits was a joke on the face of it: virtually all emission trading programs feature extensive “grandfathering” of polluters and favored constituencies.…
Continue ReadingEven if energy realists and their allies fend off Waxman-Markey, wave after wave of global warming regulation could still sweep across the U.S. economy under the aegis of EPA and the Clean Air Act.
As explained in a previous post, the carbon dioxide (CO2) litigation campaign that begat the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision (April 2007) could shut down much of our economy and replace self-government via the people’s elected representatives with the rule of bureaucrats and courts.
Energy realists need to school themselves in this constellation of issues, because the clock is ticking. On April 17, the Environmental Protection Agency, responding to Mass. v. EPA, published a proposed rule concluding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to health- and welfare-endangering “air pollution.” …
Continue ReadingOver the past year, as the party in power has proposed one restrictive measure after another for the oil and gas production industry, analysts have been busy guessing how much this would cost us in foregone production and tax revenue. In an analysis featuring welcome candor, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has estimated oil and gas production in the United States with and without restrictions. By the end of the next decade (2019), restrictive permitting and tax policies will reduce the potential annual government tax take from oil and gas production by more than the total expected yield of the Obama tax program in the oil and gas sector. In the ten years to 2019, the time-frame used in the government’s tax increase proposal, restrictions and new taxes will have reduced the tax take from oil and gas production by more than $118 billion, or about 4 times the expected yield of the new taxes.…
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