As gas prices continue to climb — reaching as high as $5.75 to $6.03 a gallon in some places — the Department of the Interior remains stingy with deepwater drilling permits. Since February 2011, the administration has issued an average of just 1.3 deepwater permits per month — a 78 percent monthly reduction from the historical monthly average of 5.8 permits a month, according to the latest Gulf Permit Index from Greater New Orleans Inc. The slow pace of permitting will likely eventually result in production declines — and that …
Senator Max Baucus (D–MT) isn’t shy about picking winners and losers. Last December, he led the charge to keep in place a subsidy of $6 billion per year to the ethanol industry. Now he’s picking the oil and gas industry as losers by proposing to eliminate subsidies for big oil and using the increased revenue to subsidize a different set of political winners. Baucus would provide even more incentives for more fuel efficient vehicles and alternative energy fueling stations. But what Senator Baucus labels as an oil and gas subsidy …
Paper or plastic? How about neither? If you live in Evanston, Ill., be prepared to kiss your plastic bags goodbye . . . and maybe your paper ones, too. Some in the city council are prepared to take a stand against what some see as a terribly pernicious threat to the environment. The Chicago Tribune reports: I hate plastic bags, and I’m prepared to vote tonight to eliminate plastic bags or brown paper bags — whatever it takes to get rid of them,” said Ald. Ann Rainey. The proposal remains …
You could substitute a newspaper article from June 2008 with today’s gas price stories, and no one would know the difference. The story is the same: politicians blaming speculators and big oil while ignoring supply and demand issues and the impact of a weak dollar on oil prices. It’s been easy for politicians to point the finger of blame at oil companies since the Gulf spill—although a large majority of Americans support offshore drilling. When politicians attack big oil, it’s important to remember who owns these companies and where that …
Well, the Chinese finally have a green-energy idea worth stealing: arrest government officials who foist overpriced, underperforming, debt-ballooning, money-losing projects on taxpayers. Earlier this year, Liu Zhijun, Minister of Railways in the People’s Republic of China, was arrested following investigations into cost overruns and poor performance of the ministry’s showcase bullet trains. To be fair, the arrests were made when the investigations uncovered potential corruption in addition to the mismanagement. But the corruption problems likely would have gone unnoticed had the bullet train program not become such a boondoggle. (The …
The same Washington press corps that hammered President George W. Bush relentlessly when prices were still well under $3 a gallon—well before the $4 a gallon peak, which lasted only six weeks in 2008—have given President Obama a pass thus far on the recklessness of his energy policy. In fact, in the first two years of his presidency, as gas prices steadily rose to over $3 a gallon, the press corps never asked the President about gas prices in any of his press briefings. Even when he called a press …
Nearly a year after the administration first halted oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico, stories of economic hardship still surface, all with the same theme: The slow pace of permitting punishes all those whose livelihood depends on the oil and gas industry — even those who had nothing to do with the spill and whose safety records are impeccable. Fergus Hodgson of the Louisiana-based Pelican Institute for Public Policy reports just such a story today. Writing in The Pelican Post, Hodgson profiles Cliffe Laborde, who, as the owner …
The City of Los Angeles is offering $2,000 rebates toward home chargers for electric cars. Once again, the government is actively choosing winners and losers and skewing the free market. If the electric car is viable, and it very well could be, the government would not need to offer rebates to buy the cars or the charging infrastructure. Charging infrastructure is a necessary market hurdle for electric vehicles to overcome, and the government has no role in overcoming that hurdle with other peoples’ money. Los Angeles is planning on handing out …
There are an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil waiting to be tapped in the Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Alaska. But after spending five years and nearly $4 billion, Shell Oil Company has been forced to abandon its efforts to drill for oil in the region. With gas at $4 per gallon and higher, one might think that more oil would be a good thing. So what’s the road block? The Environmental Protection Agency. Fox News reports that the EPA is withholding necessary air permits because of a …
Acid rain. Expanding deserts. Global cooling. As Reason.tv explains in its video “The Top Five Environmental Disasters That Didn’t Happen,” all of the above were moments of environmental hysteria that led to nothing. Others they cite? Frankenfoods, the end of biodiversity (the claim that 70-80% of the Earth’s species would be extinct by 1995), running out of energy, a “silent spring” (an apocalyptic prediction about pesticides), and Malthusian famine (hundreds of millions of people starving to death by the 1970s). Under the Obama Administration, concerns over the environment — and …
