November 2, 2017
The Union of Concerned Activists: Let the Lawsuits Begin!
They have failed to convince Congress—even Congresses controlled by the Democratic Party—to impose limits on US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite decades of effort, political threats, and grandstanding. Given the election of Donald Trump, they are losing their efforts to use the regulatory bureaucracy—an interest group with powerful budgetary and ideological incentives to impose GHG emissions policies—as a substitute source of such policies in the face of…
October 20, 2017
Subsidizing Reliable Generation Capacity: Is Mark Perry or Rick Perry Wrong?
I take a back seat to no one in my condemnations of subsidies and other policy distortions of state and regional electric power markets, a stance that I have maintained for decades. And so one might assume that I would have applauded my friend and colleague Mark Perry in his recent criticism of Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to the Federal…
October 18, 2017
The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal and the Bureaucratic Pursuit of Power
Never let a crisis go to waste, say the politicos, a stance adapted for its purposes by the permanent regulatory bureaucracy: Never let a corporate scandal go to waste. That is what comes to mind as we behold the investigations and regulatory stances following in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal that emerged in 2015, a…
August 20, 2017
The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal and the Urge for Collective Punishment
A rotten apple spoils the barrel, as the old saying goes, and because of regulatory politics and the incentives of agency officials, the spoilage often proceeds unimpeded even if the rotten one and the others occupy separate barrels. Witness for example the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal that emerged in 2015, a truly brazen act of business…
August 20, 2017
How Jeff Sessions Is Stopping the EPA’s Slush Fund
Principles are to be found in many places, a blessing in the Beltway where principles are needed on a daily basis. One such principle is enshrined in the appropriations clause of the constitution: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” And here is another principle not…
August 7, 2017
The High Cost of Unreliable Power
The climate obsessions of the Obama administration yielded a substantial myopia with respect to the other central goals of energy policy, the cost and reliability of the electric power system in particular. One obvious result of that single-minded focus was a concerted effort to ignore several unavoidable trade-offs, as the push proceeded for expansion of…
August 3, 2017
Wasteful Subsidies for Me and Thee, Not for That Fossil Guy Behind the Tree
Sometimes leftist environmentalists have a point. For instance, they argue that oil subsidies are wasteful and should be abolished. Unfortunately, they typically pollute their sound argument with gross inconsistency and unwarranted alarmism. Oil Change International, a group of mainstream leftist environmental pressure organizations, has published two recent papers complaining that the G20 governments, through international and national development…
June 21, 2017
Other People’s Money: The Immorality Of The Fossil-Fuel Divestment Campaign
California is the center of the political campaign to induce pension funds and others to divest from fossil-fuel investments, justified as a path toward environmental improvement. Unsurprisingly, a new study finds that divestment would lead to losses of up to $3 trillion for Calpers over a 50-year time horizon. The implications for smaller retirement systems also are negative. Since the environmental effects of divestment…
June 21, 2017
Another Deal on Power Debt Won’t Help Puerto Rico’s Economy
It’s been a long and winding road toward the resolution of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority bonded debt. It totals $9 billion, the largest single component of Puerto Rico’s overall debt of about $70 billion. The commonwealth’s top officials, the power authority and the bondholders recognize that the power authority cannot service this debt in full while modernizing…
June 15, 2017
NY Attorney General Is the ‘Energizer Bunny’ of Exxon Perfidy
This piece originally appeared as “NY attorney general is the ‘Energizer Bunny’ of Exxon deceit” in The Hill. When last we observed New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s pursuit of ExxonMobil, he was arguing that the firm had misled investors about the risks of anthropogenic climate change. According to Schneiderman, climate change is real (true); its adverse…