Once the electorate was made to realize that cap-and-trade bills (Lieberman-Warner, Waxman-Markey, etc.) were actually taxes on fossil energy, cap and trade became political poison. So it is surprising that an explicit tax on fossil energy is now being pushed in Washington. The hope among carbon-tax proponents is that they …
Disappointed with the lack of global warming discussion in the current presidential campaign, tabloid climatologists have latched onto Hurricane Sandy as their vehicle for relevance. The more reserved among them use lines like “Though we cannot prove that global warming caused Hurricane Sandy, the scientists predict there will be more …
The Administration’s green jobs initiatives appear to be the Detroit Tigers of the policy world—they are 0-for-4 in the major reports on their success. In the past year, there have been four reports on green jobs by the Department of Labor: two from the department’s inspector general’s office and two …
Politicians too often confuse “free money” with “free markets”—that is, they consider themselves pro-business when they work deals that make some businesses happy, even though it usually comes at the expense of the overall economy. So it should be no surprise that President Obama claimed in a Morning Joe interview …
The Environmental Protection Agency’s world is chock full of external costs and external benefits that it must rectify with taxes, subsidies, and regulations. For instance, to cure this world of CO2-itis, the EPA, along with the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA), recently released the latest version of the …
The production tax credit (PTC) for wind energy is set to expire at the end of this year, but its supporters are arguing for an everlasting extension using twisted logic. For a while, the argument was that businesses need certainty. The law as it currently stands provides certainty—eligibility for the …
