“The wind PTC is critical to President Obama’s recently finalized carbon regulation. One of the ‘building blocks’ used to determine state targets includes significant increased installation of renewable energy—especially wind…. Without taxpayer subsidies like the PTC, the President will be unable to achieve his arbitrary renewable energy target.”
It is time for Republicans and fiscally-minded Democrats to put up or shut up on the centerpiece of Obama energy policy: the Production Tax Credit (PTC). It is high time that cronyism be replaced by an energy policy that is taxpayer-neutral and government-neutral. Obama’s climate alarmism and world government plans can only benefit from a 10th extension of this grievous government subsidy to the Enrons and GEs of the world.
This week, the American Energy Alliance, Heritage Action for America, Club for Growth, and Americans for Prosperity sent a letter in stark opposition to the PTC to the House Ways and Means Committee.…
“The U.N.’s own report shows that aggressive emission cutbacks—even if achieved through an ‘efficient’ carbon tax—would probably cause more harm than good.” (p. 2)
“Libertarians and conservatives in particular should not simply trust the assurances from the advocates of a carbon tax, but should instead read the relevant literature themselves. In both theory and practice, a U.S. carbon tax remains a very dubious policy proposal.” (p. 36)
– Robert Murphy, Patrick Michaels, and Paul Knappenberger, “The Case Against a Carbon Tax,” Cato Working Paper No. 33, September 4, 2015.
Are opponents of pricing carbon dioxide (CO2) in general, and a U.S. carbon tax in particular, uninformed about the physical science of man-made climate change? Are opponents also in denial about market-failure economic analysis?
Hardly. Serious intellectual flaws exist in the case for CO2 pricing in the peer-reviewed literature, even the mainstream scientific literature.…
F. A. Hayek made many contributions to the social sciences in his lifetime. This post shares his thoughts about natural resources–really mineral resources–from his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty. His thinking is contained in the section, “Conservation of Natural Resources,” (pp. 367–71).
The question Hayek addresses is whether self-interested free-market decisions overuse important, even ‘depletable,’ resources, leaving less for posterity from an economic viewpoint. Hayek argues against what might be called conservationism, or conservation for its own sake where present-value analysis does not apply.
————-
Hayek employed familiar reasoning to explain how privately owned resources had a capital or salable value, which was particularly relevant to mineral deposits for which, ceteris paribus, present production meant less future production. [1] In his words:
…If the owner can get a higher return by selling to those who want to conserve than by exploiting the particular resource himself, he will do so.