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November 2, 2018
Nigerian Officials Learn the Hard Way About Where Money Goes
Hope springs eternal, a human inclination affecting romance, dieting, new year’s resolutions, and a good deal more. International investing is prominent among the activities often influenced by a hope that things somehow will work out, whatever the landmines known to obstruct the path toward healthy economic returns. Which brings us to the tale of Process…
October 29, 2018
Politicized Law Enforcement and the ExxonMobil White Whale
The latest lawsuit against ExxonMobil (EM), filed by Acting New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood, is straightforward: Got that? Underwood actually is arguing that EM should not concern itself — or its investors — with (1) the aggregate effect of GHG policies on prospective worldwide demand conditions for its energy products, and (2) the…
October 29, 2018
Washington State Initiative 1631: A Carbon Tax and Wealth Redistribution to Favored Interests
The Washington State electorate on November 6 will vote on Initiative 1631, a “pollution” tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the stated goal of which is an annual GHG emissions reduction reaching 25 million tons by 2035 and 50 million tons by 2050. Nowhere in the initiative is there any requirement actually to meet these goals —…
October 22, 2018
Hearken Sinners: The End Is Near
Dog bites man. Baby cries. Water flows downhill. And the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says climate catastrophe is imminent. The new “Summary for Policymakers” of Global Warming of 1.5°Celsius, a “special report” from the IPCC, makes the following central arguments: It is difficult to see how anyone attempting to maintain an objective…
October 15, 2018
Subsidies to Power Plants Are No Substitute for a National-security Plan
In an effort to deal with the market and non-market forces inflicting economic losses on coal- and nuclear-power plants, the Trump administration is seeking through regulation to force state and regional grid operators to purchase bulk power from coal- and nuclear-power producers to slow the (early) retirements of those facilities. The administration is justifying this policy on national-security grounds:…
October 4, 2018
Washington Post Climate Reporters Beclown Themselves
They have translated the climate policy equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They have uncovered the smoking gun of smoking guns. They have provided final and convincing proof that the Trump administration — the bête noire of the Paris climate agreement, the facilitators of planetary destruction, the knuckle-dragging deniers of “science,” the heroes of polluters, belching cattle, and…
October 1, 2018
Reforming U.S. Environmental Policy
Environmental protection can be an important government function, in particular because private incentives, as reflected in market prices, often do not capture the full social value of environmental quality, or perhaps more precisely, changes in that quality. In the standard analytic framework, private actors cannot capture the value of environmental improvements, or do not bear…
July 25, 2018
A Critique of Mark Perry on the Trump Energy Policy
My AEI colleague Mark J. Perry has written a short essay arguing that “Trump’s Energy Policy Is Deeply Flawed,” the central themes of which are: These arguments are rather uncharacteristic of Mark, truly a first-rate economist and policy thinker. Let us begin with a first principle: The magnitude or degree of “dependence” on foreign sources of…
July 23, 2018
The Curbelo Carbon Tax as Wealth Redistribution
Environmental policy as a tool of wealth redistribution is nothing new. The latest example is a proposal for a greenhouse-gas (GHG) tax just introduced by Representative Carlos Curbelo (R., Fla.). Curbelo’s tax would start at $24 per metric ton of GHG emissions, growing 2 percent per year above inflation and an additional $2 per ton…
July 17, 2018
State Attorneys General and the Climate Litigation Game
The central broad objective of the U.S. constitution is the protection of unpopular individuals and political groups from the whims and passions of the political majority of the moment. It is curious therefore that the election of prosecutors, in particular that of state Attorneys General, seemingly is accepted as a norm by many despite the…