A cloud of photochemical smog from China drifted into Japan this week. The story highlights the fact that air pollution in China is getting worse—despite lamentations that the “world is passing us by” in clean energy. That quote came from Steven Chu, President Obama’s then-Secretary of Energy, in 2009. Chu …
During his 2013 inaugural address, President Obama told Americans that the United States “will respond to the threat of climate change” and will take the lead for other countries to follow suit. This commitment is a willful rejection of reality. Congress has been unwilling to enact legislation to unilaterally address …
Lisa Jackson will retire from her position as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this month as the most prolific regulator of her class of Obama administrators. This is not a distinction to be coveted. Under Jackson’s leadership, the EPA has issued 1,824 regulations. For context, the Department of …
President Obama recently signed legislation that prevents the European Union (EU) from taxing U.S. airline emissions for planes that travel to and from EU countries. Although the EU announced it would delay the tax from its broader cap-and-trade-like system for a year, the new law protects U.S. airlines from the …
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 …
To its credit, the Obama Administration has yet to endorse a carbon tax. Such a tax is promised as the one-two punch that will put a significant dent in America’s fiscal crisis and the supposed impending doom from manmade global warming. This “market-based” approach will, supporters promise, bring new revenue …
Efforts to protect the environment in America have ignored the most powerful force for improving the environment: free people. The results of these misguided policies have been higher energy prices, lower incomes, less access to resources, and technological stagnation—often failing to produce tangible environmental benefits. It doesn’t have to be …
Instead of rallying together to fight the Obama Administration’s backdoor environmental regulations, which have exorbitant costs and minimal benefit, some conservative organizations are working with liberal groups to push costs higher by piling on a carbon tax. This would be nothing more than an enormously high, regressive energy tax that …
