“8). Do you support a carbon tax? Do you support the Obama administration’s use of the social cost of carbon in rulemakings?

A. No and No.

 9). Do you think federal agencies have abused the cost-benefit process to suit their political agenda? Would your administration end the process of underestimating costs and inflating benefits of agency regulations?

A. Yes and Yes.”

President candidate Donald Trump responded to ten questions submitted by the free-market energy advocacy group, American Energy Alliance (the advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research, of which I am founder and CEO). Overall, there is great promise of market-oriented reform, reinforcing Trump’s earlier statements about reigning in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Trump is weak on ethanol mandates and pretty good on most other issues. A particularly weak sentence is: “Until this nation sets its sights on total energy independence, we must support all energy sources.”…

When asked if a carbon tax was preferable to EPA regulations on greenhouse gases, David Kreutzer, a research fellow with the Heritage Foundation who sat on yesterday’s panel, described the question as a trap.

It’s like asking me what’s the most humane way to execute innocent people …. When conservatives talk about a carbon tax, the headline says, “Conservative supports carbon tax,” So I’m not going to be drawn into this fantasy world where we speculate on what might happen when we know it won’t, when it gives people ammo to misrepresent what I said.

So no, a carbon tax is not preferable to EPA regulations.

– Evan Lehmann, “Conservatives Attack Each Other Over Carbon Tax Plans,” ClimateWire, July 18, 2013.

“[Ken] Green delighted his mostly conservative audience by comparing a carbon tax to a vampire who must be staked, beheaded and sprinkled over water — ‘preferably holy water’.”

At the May 29, 2013, annual meeting of Exxon Mobil in Dallas, CEO Rex Tillerson adroitly responded to questions concerning the human influence on climate and energy choices in light of climate science. His points? The science is uncertain as to the magnitude of change; there has not been warming in the last decade; and fossil fuels are necessary for the masses, particularly the energy poor. As he asked a questioner:

How do you want to deal with that great social challenge to what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers in the process of those efforts when you don’t know exactly what your impacts are going to be?

Friendly Floor Comments

Some statements from the floor were friendly. “It’s funny,” said one. “You have helped to find enough oil and gas in this country so that the protestors here [could] leave their heated and air conditioned homes and fly and drive here so they can protest the way Exxon runs their business.”…

“It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.”

– Robert Bryce, “Five Truths About Climate Change,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011.

“Every [energy] policy objective should be viewed through the lens of affordability.”

– John S. Watson, Chairman and CEO, Chevron Corporation
Remarks at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C., October 19, 2011.

Chevron CEO John Watson delivered a major address last month in Washington, D.C. that reorients energy sustainability from controversial neo-Malthusian notions toward consumer affordability and reliability. As such, it marks an end to the ‘apologetic’ era launched by BP’s John Browne in his 1997 Stanford University speech, which proclaimed that fossil fuels were problematic in relation to anthropogenic climate change.…