Energy Statism: R Street Hits New Low (carbon tax dead, so wind & solar lovefest today)

“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”

It had to happen.

With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.

Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.

But Trump got elected and implemented a pro-consumer, CO2-neutral energy policy. In the process, he demoted climate alarmism in order to liberate fossil fuels from a Malthusian staightjacket.

Now, with today’s seminar (below), R Street continues to live the lie of “engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.” Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with a global tariffs (“border adjustment”) program and tax adjustments (“equity adjustments”), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) “clean” political energies has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.

If R Street were really what is says it is, the debate would be about the costs and benefits of CO2; government failure versus alleged market failure; and the economic and environmental issues with politically correct energies (ethanol for transportation, wind and solar for electrical generation, and electric vehicles).

R Street now appears to be all-in with wind and solar, two industries propped up by government violations of the voluntary market consensus: state quotas for renewables, outsized tax subsidies, and public R&D funding.  The ‘keep it in the ground’ anti-fossil-fuel funders of R Street have Josiah Neeley (who in a previous life argued against the very things he is now fronting) as their front man.

What a Fib!

The pitch for tomorrow’s seminar–Red State = Clean Energy: How market-driven clean energy is transforming the Texas electrical grid–is quite deceptive. It trumpets Republican statism/cronyism in Texas that can be traced directly to Ken Lay and Enron. It then blazingly assumes/calls wind power and solar power “clean energy.” R Street trumpets the $7 billion windpower boondoggle called CREZ, previously exposed at MasterResource.

Here is the pitch:

Thanks to past actions by state leaders including George W. Bush and Rick Perry, Texas is in the midst of a clean energy transition driven primarily by market forces. Over the last 20 years, the deregulation of the Texas electricity market and other initiatives, such as adopting one of the first Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) and investing in the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) to bring renewable power to Texas cities, have laid the foundation for today’s market-driven transition away from coal and toward cleaner fuels like natural gas and renewable energy.

What can federal lawmakers learn from the Texas example? Please join us for a discussion of how these trends are playing out in the Texas electric market, how conservative leaders are embracing the economic benefits of clean energy, and what the “Texas story” can teach us about current energy debates in Washington and around the country.

Conclusion

Energy statism is energy statism, whether it has a Democrat or Republican face. And in the case of R Street, energy statism has taken on new heights–directly contradicting the “About” section of R Street itself. Just follow the money right to the funding–and the premium salaries R Street can pay to bribe off former free market scholars.

There is another lesson in the descent of R Street regarding energy policy: an academic analogue of what in the classical liberal scholarship is called the Mises interventionist thesis.

When the government intervenes and problems develop, the government can either remove the original intervention or expand intervention. As intervention expands, still more intervention is required. The classic example is monetary expansion leading to price inflation, which inspires price controls which (via shortages) turns into allocation regulation. (Think US monetary and energy policy in the 1970s.)

For R Street, it began with pricing CO2 via tax-and-dividend program as a “better” program than command-and-control regulation. But with Trump taking away the potential for such a trade, the interventionist tide of CO2 regulation went out. And free market types suddenly were naked with their not-so-free-market premises (climate alarmism).

With carbon taxation a nonstarter on the federal and state levels, what was R Street to do?  Argue against climate-related regulatory junk? No. Rather than embrace noninterventionism, R Street has gone for what appears to be open-ended politicization of energy with (government dependent) wind power and solar power.

One wishes that Josiah Neeley would rebel or resign–all on principal. But money is a very powerful thing.

Read it and weep ….