“Nothing in the Clean Air Act says EPA needs to promulgate any of these rules. But nothing says it can’t do so. It’s largely discretionary, and this Administration is determined to ‘interpret’ the science and use its executive authority to restrict and penalize hydrocarbon use – and ‘fundamentally transform’ America.”
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations (Heritage Foundation: forthcoming). Many will bring few health or environmental benefits but impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the Administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon (aka anti-industrial-growth) agenda.
The Heritage Foundation has calculated that his EPA’s twenty “major” rulemaking decisions (costing $100 million or more annually) alone could cost the United States over $36 billion per year.
Cleaning Up Clean
The latest example involves a third layer (or tier) of rules that the agency says will clean the nation’s air and save lives, by forcing refineries to remove more sulfur and other impurities from gasoline.…
Continue ReadingThe government has created a market in “Renewable Energy Certificates,” also known as a “Renewable Energy Credit.” RECs are yet another way that renewable energy sources take advantage of the public’s good graces, and the propensity for some politicians to be fooled into creative ways to burden unsuspecting citizens.
As far as RECs have a public purpose, two fundamental questions are:
1) Do RECs pay for the generation of new renewable energy as claimed?
2) Do RECs offset fossil fuels as claimed?
Background
RECs are sold in two primary markets:
… Continue Reading1) some of the states that have RPSs (Renewable Portfolio Standards) allow part of the renewable mandate to be satisfied by the utility company purchasing RECs (instead of actually buying renewable energy electricity), and
2) businesses and individuals purchase RECs for perceived public relations benefits, or to ameliorate their conscience.
“Government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven.”
– Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World. New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 453.
“An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk,” declares Will Oremus in Slate. In “The Iron Lady’s Strong Stance on Climate Change” (Daily Climate, reposted at Climate Progress), author Douglas Fischer notes “how seriously [Margaret Thatcher] viewed the threat of climate change and the robustness, more than 20 years ago, of climate science and United Nations body tasked with assessing state of that science.”
True, UK Prime Minister Thatcher was the first and most important international figure to champion the cause of climate alarmism. But the above authors conveniently stop their discussion with her pronouncements in the early 1990s.…
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