A Free-Market Energy Blog

Rent Seeking, Crony Capitalism, and U.S. Energy Politics: Who Wins from the Racket?

By Donald Hertzmark -- August 5, 2009

A calm has descended over the federal government’s initiatives in energy amid the furor over health insurance legislation. The respite is welcome, but the sturm und drang of clashing interests will resume in earnest after Congress’s summer recess. There is too much money on the table–our money–for the favor-seekers to ignore.

A Banana Republic?

Increasingly, it is clear that the initial cap-and-trade legislation was insufficiently opaque. Numerous analyses of Waxman-Markey (HR 2454) on this site and others have shown that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will cost consumers dearly by raising the prices of electricity and gasoline, while ignoring viable sources of clean energy that have not yet found the key to the federal treasury.

With so much money at stake, each of the contestants (call them rent-seekers, some of them reluctant players in the political capitalism game) will attempt to gather up as much of the pot as possible.…

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UK Report: Taxpayer Funding for Climate Alarmism ($11 million of $60 million total)

By Matthew Sinclair -- August 4, 2009

TaxPayers’ Alliance has just released a new report on the scale that British taxpayers’ money is being used to fund lobbying and political campaigning. We found that £38 million – $60 million – was being spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in just a year, a portion of which aims to secure greater government intervention to try to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is about climate alarmism and related policy activism, not sober science and free-market reliance.

Examples

The Sustainable Development Commission, a public sector body with a budget of over £4 million, writes reports arguing that economic growth is a bad thing and that “natural justice tells us that individual emissions of CO2 must, in the long run, converge around the same per capita entitlement.”

The New Economics Foundation are responsible for the Happy Planet Index, which places Saudi Arabia and Burma above the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States in terms of “achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources.”…

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McCain Echoes Hansen: Waxman-Markey is a ‘Farce’ (The Civil War widens among climate alarmists)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- August 3, 2009

“[The Waxman-Markey] 1,400-page bill is a farce. They bought every industry off—steel mills, agriculture, utilities…. I would not only not vote for it. I am opposed to it entirely, because it does damage to those of us who believe that we need to act in a rational fashion about climate change.”

– Senator John McCain to Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, August 1-2, 2009, p. A9.

“The truth is, the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. It is an exceedingly inefficient way to get a small reduction of emissions. It is less than worthless….”

-James Hansen, “Strategies to Address Global Warming,” July 13, 2009.

The death of federal climate legislation in 2009 will not only be because traditional Republicans and conservative Democrats said “no”. It will also be because true believers like Senator John McCain realize that politicized cap-and-trade is all pain and no gain.…

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Worth Re-reading Weekend (MasterResource works for lazy summer days too)

By -- August 1, 2009
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Out, Out, Damn Speculators! (The CFTC reverses, impressing few economists)

By -- July 31, 2009
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Waxman-Markey: Inconsequential for Sea-Level Rise, Too

By Chip Knappenberger -- July 30, 2009
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Windpower: Focusing the Criticism Away from NIMBYism and Aesthetics

By Michael Giberson -- July 29, 2009
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Interior Secretary Salazar on Wind: A Reality Check

By Robert Peltier -- July 28, 2009
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Environmentalists Questioning Windpower Should Scrutinize Climate Alarmism

By -- July 27, 2009
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150,000 and Counting –Thank You Viewers!

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 25, 2009
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