Today, Senators Jim DeMint (R–SC) and Mike Lee (R–UT) introduced legislation that would move the United States a giant step forward in making our country’s energy market freer by eliminating targeted tax credits for energy sources and technologies. Their legislation, a companion to Representative Mike Pompeo’s (R–KS) bill, would force any tax policy that picks certain industries as winners and losers in the market to expire at the end of the year and expedite sunsets for tax credits extending multiple years. And it goes after all targeted tax credits: oil, …
The American people know that cap and trade energy policies will lead to higher energy costs and fewer jobs. That is why even Democratic candidates like Sen.-elect Joe Manchin (D-WV) famously shot President Barack Obama’s cap and trade bill in a television commercial this fall. But the progressive campaign to force Americans to pay higher energy costs did not die with cap and trade. The New York Times reports today: Deals to buy renewable power have been scuttled or slowed in states including Florida, Idaho and Kentucky as well as …
When an environmental law or regulation passes in California, it usually comes as a surprise to no one. After all, it’s California. So when the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved regulations to reduce diesel emissions—despite opposition from the trucking industry—most thought of it as “California being California.” Now California may significantly reduce the regulations, because scientists drastically exaggerated the diesel emission levels from off-road machinery. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Claim Check, which supposedly fact checks public statements, employs the different-must-be-wrong-theory in dismissing a Heritage analysis because it is an “outlier.” It seems that many forecasters in Washington are more afraid of being alone than they are of being wrong. That is, they would rather be wrong with everybody else than right by themselves. One such case is the set of assumptions underlying estimates of economic impacts of the Waxman–Markey cap-and-trade legislation. Most of the analyses of Waxman–Markey based their cost projections on the following assumptions: A virtual doubling of …
The probability of cap and trade becoming law rapidly diminished as more and more people saw it for what it truly is: a national energy tax. Since 85 percent of our energy comes from carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and the goal of cap and trade is to reduce carbon dioxide, a cap-and-trade system would raise the price of energy to discourage its use. Politicians knew very well that Americans wouldn’t stand for a national energy tax—especially during an election year—so despite several murmurs, the Senate failed to move legislation forward. Now, …
Last Thursday, a who’s who of the progressive movement met for a conference call organized by Families USA and hosted by the advocacy group for government-run health care, The Herndon Alliance. The Alliance’s partners include AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, MoveOn and La Raza, among many others. Democratic pollsters John Anzalone, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg were the call’s main event, and they were there to deliver some bad news. Politico reports: “Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, …
Carol Browner, President Obama’s top climate and energy adviser, joined David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press over the weekend and expressed disappointment over the Senate’s inability to pass cap-and-trade legislation. She mentioned “potentially” moving forward with a cap-and-trade bill during the lame duck session. The probability of passing energy tax legislation that would kill more than 2 million jobs may be low, but it’s Browner’s thought process that is particularly troublesome. She said, There’s a tremendous opportunity for our country to lead the global clean energy revolution. But that …
What would you do if the government forced you to turn off your air conditioning? Could you still live where you live or work where you work? Probably not. But that’s not just a bug in the enviro-left’s high energy cost future, its a feature! Stan Cox makes the case in yesterday’s Washington Post: In a country that’s among the world’s highest greenhouse-gas emitters, air conditioning is one of the worst power-guzzlers. … A.C.’s obvious public-health benefits during severe heat waves do not justify its lavish use in everyday life …
Here’s a principles-of-economics question: Suppose the U.S. gross domestic product (national income) is currently $14 trillion. Then suppose the U.S. raised all tariff, income tax, and sales tax rates to 100 percent. How much money would the government collect? If you realized that nobody would generate taxable income under such a regime and answered “zero,” congratulations. If, instead, you answered $14 trillion, you may have a future at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), because that is how they analyze (score) the fiscal impacts of the Kerry–Lieberman climate change bill. In …
President Barack Obama delivered his first Oval Office speech on the heels of his latest visit to the Gulf region – the fourth since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April. With such an environmental and economic crisis present, the president needs to exert leadership to protect our precious coastal resources and clean up the spill. His message was the wrong one. Instead, he continued to politicize the crisis by pushing for cap and trade legislation and to establish a separate claims fund – financed by BP – that will …
