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May 25, 2017
The Absurdity That Is the Paris Climate Agreement
Let us put aside initially any dispute about the science and evidence underlying the Paris COP-21 agreement to limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Let us ask instead what the agreement ostensibly would achieve and what it would cost. If we apply the EPA climate model under a set of assumptions that strongly exaggerate the effectiveness of international emissions reductions, the…
May 18, 2017
Exxon Lied, People Died — or Something
Thee heat is on, not because summer beckons, but instead because of a pressure campaign now being aimed at the new California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra. An alliance of environmentalists, plaintiff attorneys, public-sector spending interests, public officials, and others is attempting to induce him to investigate the fossil-fuel industry in general and Exxon in particular. The argument is…
April 21, 2017
Earth Day and the Divestment Campaign Against Humanity
Is it confusion? Or is it malevolence? “It” is the driving force underlying the loud clamor for divestment from fossil fuel assets, a political pressure campaign that is growing in sound and fury—and international jet-setting—even as actual government actions to reduce the production and use of fossil fuels are proving futile. @vinnikava via Twenty20 The answer: It is both, so that divestment will be a central theme of…
April 11, 2017
Sticky Tar of Climate Politics Oozes over Oil Reserve Valuations
Environmentalist ideology and political ambition in combination make for a dangerous blend, and nowhere is that truth clearer than in the context of climate politics, the valuation of fossil-fuel reserves and accusations of “fraud.” With the deregulatory decisions of the Trump administration, in particular in the context of a severe prospective reduction in federal efforts…
February 9, 2017
The Achilles’ Heel of the Obama Climate Regulations
An existing executive order can be reversed with a new one — a stroke of the pen — but regulations promulgated through the formal public notice and comment processes of administrative law can be undone only with newer regulations adopted through that same mechanism. Moreover, efforts to reform or to reverse a regulatory apparatus as…
January 27, 2017
The Environmental Left and Keystone XL
Everything old is new again, the latest manifestation of which is the reaction of the environmental Left to the news that President Donald Trump has issued presidential memoranda and an executive order resurrecting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and beginning the process of reversing the abject obstructionism of the Obama administration toward infrastructure investment for the production and transport…
December 14, 2016
Trump Nominee Scott Pruitt Will Clean up the EPA
Life in the Beltway offers a range of amusements, the latest of which is the reaction of the environmental left to President-elect Donald Trump’s announced intention to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R) to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Climate denier! An enemy of the EPA! An arsonist in charge of fighting…
December 6, 2016
Trump’s Realistic Thinking on Climate Change
President-elect Donald J. Trump said recently that there exists “some connectivity” between human activity and climate change, which may or may not reflect a shift in his view on that scientific question. But he has indicated no change in his policy stance on various attendant regulations, and an “open mind” on a U.S. exit from…
November 21, 2016
The Magical Powers of the Social Cost of Carbon
When last we joined hands around the ourenergypolicy.org campfire, roasting s’mores and singing songs of camaraderie, we told tales of one particular monster of the dark, to wit, the Obama administration analysis of the social cost of carbon, perhaps the most dishonest exercise in political arithmetic ever produced by the federal bureaucracy. But this is the Beltway: No perfidy goes unrewarded. And so…
October 18, 2016
Washington State Initiative 732 — All Cost, No Benefit
Voters in the state of Washington will vote November 8 on Initiative 732, which would impose a “carbon tax” on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and thus on energy, while reducing the sales tax and almost eliminating the business and occupation tax on manufacturers. Here is a number that those voters should keep in mind: twenty-five…