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June 16, 2022
Against a Carbon Tax
Proposals for “carbon pricing” and a border-adjustment tax on imports and credits on exports — the central ancillary policy needed to preserve the competitiveness of U.S. companies given the implementation of a tax on carbon — are back in the news. Various observers, public officials, and many economists endorse it as the most “efficient” way of addressing…
June 9, 2022
The Silliness of Carbon Capture and Sequestration
Beltway nostrums are a dime a dozen, and the climate problem threat emergency crisis existential threat is tailor-made to elicit hundreds of them. An old one now receiving increasing attention is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a technology designed to capture greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as they are produced as byproducts of such industrial processes as power generation, and then…
June 8, 2022
Sorry America, Oil Is As Secure As It Gets
American consumers are still suffering from record gasoline prices as the summer driving season kicks off. President Biden recently proclaimed that these prices were driving an “incredible transition” that will make the world “stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.” The unfortunate reality is that oil is as secure as it gets. America should expand…
May 16, 2022
Canceling Federal Oil and Gas Leases Isn’t About Climate Change
The Biden administration last week canceled a large oil and gas lease sale — over 1 million acres — in the Alaska Cook Inlet as well as two sales in the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department argued that the Alaska cancellation was “due to lack of industry interest in leasing in the area,” but that is obvious…
May 3, 2022
Offshore Fossil Leasing and the Biden Flouting of the Law
Let us review the plain language of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (§1344(a)): “The Secretary [of the Interior] shall prepare and periodically revise, and maintain an oil and gas leasing program,” defined by the Congressional Research Service as a requirement that the Interior Department “prepare and maintain forward-looking five-year plans… to schedule proposed oil and gas lease sales on the U.S. outer continental shelf…
April 25, 2022
Some Fallacies Attendant Upon the Biden Resumption of Fossil Leasing
The Biden administration announced late last week that it would resume leasing of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration and production, but at a scale (144,000 acres) about 80 percent smaller than the 733,000 acres that had been nominated by energy companies for evaluation by the Department of the Interior. (Over 90 percent of the acreage to…
April 22, 2022
Earth Day 2022: Investing in Poverty, Suffering, and Human Degradation
It is Earth Day 2022 — always falling on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough — the official theme of which this year is Invest In Our Planet™. As with every previous Earth Day, we will be bombarded with innumerable web sites both infantile and mendacious, crude propaganda exercises, myriad pleas for networking, virtue signaling as a central dynamic, mindless…
April 14, 2022
Biden’s Blame Game Will Raise Oil Prices
Instead of taking steps to boost U.S. oil and gas production amid skyrocketing prices and the war in Ukraine, President Biden is standing by his green-energy goals and blaming fossil-fuel companies for the consequences. This will make today’s energy problems even worse. Though he campaigned on a promise to ban drilling on federal lands and…
April 14, 2022
More Gasoline Gimmickry From the Biden Administration
Oh what a tangled web it weaves when first the Biden administration practices to deceive. That is a slight paraphrase of Sir Walter Scott’s famous observation, but it is wholly appropriate as a general description of the Biden administration’s desperate efforts to avoid political responsibility for the sharp increases in fuel costs for which its fossil-fuel…
March 28, 2022
Illiberalism’s True Colors
Nineteen-fifty-six—when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary—was, according to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the year “British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.” If 2016 did not constitute such a year for conservatives in the West, then perhaps 2022—when Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine—will, at least for those…