As the ethanol industry sees its prospects flounder, it has sought the help of an actual general to stem the public backlash against its uneconomic, environmentally harmful product. Reports Fortune:
Reporting for duty in ethanol’s counterattack: Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former NATO commander, who signed on in February as co-chairman of an upstart ethanol trade group called Growth Energy. Clark, 64, has fully embraced the private sector since ending his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.…
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The tenth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.
Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the U.S. House of Representatives (435 employees, $4 trillion budget).
The Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill that passed the House last week contains 397 new regulations, according to CEI Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman and former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Jeremy Lott. The legislation now heads off to the Senate.
It is worth noting that just minutes after the…
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Noted atmospheric scientist and Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Paul Krugman, has a rant in the New York Times today saying that House members — the “deniers” who voted against the pork-filled energy bill — were guilty of “treason against the planet.”
As Krugman wrote:
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
He must have been watching a different debate. I was most taken with…
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In Washington, beware any proposal that attempts to “level the playing field.” What is usually meant is hobbling competition with restrictive rules and regulations that often raise costs for consumers. On the international playing field, such “leveling” can have broader disastrous consequences.
That’s likely to be the case with the House Ways and Means’ misguided proposals to impose carbon taxes on imports from countries that haven’t taken stringent measures to control greenhouse gas emissions.
It turns out that the huge and complex energy bill…
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Word has it that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade/energy tax bill is finally hitting the floor of the House, probably this Friday. CEI is decidedly in the “anti” camp. To that end, we released a statement this morning by Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell on the legislation and its potential impacts:
Waxman-Markey is a 1,201-page economic suicide note. Those Members of the House who vote for it are voting for long-term economic decline and for turning the United States into a second-rate…
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by Marc Scribner
June 16, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
During the 2008 presidential campaign and even in the months following President Barack Obama’s election, Democrats in Congress and the administration have said with straight faces that the “stimulus” package would contain no earmarks. They focused on a pet project of some Illinois politicians, including then-Senator Barack Obama–the FutureGen clean-coal power plant. This is what was said then:
“We don’t want any room for Republicans or Democrats to put earmarks in — even to worthy projects,” said a West Wing aide.
FutureGen is a…
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Steve Forbes in the Washington Times today has a very nice tribute to CEI on its 25th Anniversary. Forbes points out some of CEI’s significant achievements in pursuit of freedom and against expanding government and the real need for CEI and other free market groups to continue their strong defense of these principles.
Here’s his conclusion:
Groups like CEI are a crucial voice for entrepreneurs and all people who want to pursue their own destiny in life. That must seem like a lonely…
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The federal government is spending more than $50 billion to bail out General Motors, with no end in sight. But the UAW union refused to sacrifice its privileged position to save the company, demanding excessive wages and benefits that are much higher than most Americans get. The Obama Administration caved in to its demands, saddling GM with high labor costs that may doom the company in the long run.
As the Washington Post notes today, the “concessions” that Obama obtained from the UAW were…
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The federal government is giving another $30 billion in taxpayer money to General Motors to allow it to operate without having to cut excessive union wages. The Obama Administration is “gambling” on its ability to turn around the company under government control.
The Obama Administration has said it will now interfere not just with the “selection of the company’s board of directors,” but also in “fundamental corporate decisions,” and “major corporate events and transactions.” For example, Obama recently pressured GM to keep its headquarters…
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One of Obama’s own advisers admits that the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”
Obama adviser Martin Feldstein notes that “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of…
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Even the liberal Washington Post, which endorsed Obama and has not backed a Republican for president since 1952, is getting fed up with the Obama Administration’s wasteful and politicized bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler. Today, it laments the
“imminent transformation of General Motors into a government-owned company, infused with upward of $50 billion in federal money.” “It doesn’t take much imagination to forecast the political pressures that will buffet the government-as-auto-executive. We’ve seen one effect already in the preferential treatment of the autoworkers’…
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That may seem counter-intuitive, because burning ethanol merely puts back into the air the carbon dioxide (CO2) that corn crops recently pulled out of it, whereas burning gasoline liberates carbon that had been stored in geologic deposits for millions of years.
But other factors come into play, such as the fossil energy inputs required to produce the corn, turn it into ethanol, and deliver the ethanol to market.
In addition, as EPA argues in its proposed rule to implement the renewable fuel standard program established by the…
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Bjorn Lomborg, November 2007:
…although it may seem almost comically straightforward, one of the best temperature-reducing approaches is very simple: paint things white. Cities have a lot of black asphalt and dark, heat-absorbing structures. By increasing reflection and shade, a great deal of heat build-up can be avoided. Paint most of a city and you could lower the temperature by 10C.
Steven Chu, May 2009:
Professor Steven Chu, speaking at the opening of the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The…
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by Sam Kazman
May 22, 2009 @ 12:43 pm
President Obama unveiled Tuesday a plan to sharply increase federal gas mileage rules for vehicles sold in the United States, eventually bringing the requirement up to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon. Unfortunately, these rules – known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards – have the deadly effect of causing new cars to be lighter, smaller and less crashworthy.
CAFE is among the deadliest government regulations we have, and with today’s announcement it’s going to get even deadlier.…
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The federal government poured billions of dollars into Chrysler, which then went bankrupt and merged with Fiat. But Chrysler may never revive, thanks to absurdly generous compensation for the company’s union employees. The Obama Administration has refused to cut union wages substantially, though it had no compunction about ripping off the pension funds and other lenders who loaned money to Chrysler to try to keep it afloat. Even union members seem surprised by how little they were asked to sacrifice.
Moderate Democrat Mickey Kaus, who reluctantly…
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California’s voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a series of tax increases that Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-controlled state legislature claimed were necessary to save the State from bankruptcy. The voters have it right, as do the conservative Republicans in the legislature. State Senate Republicans were so determined to oppose the tax increases that they kicked out their leader when he caved to pressure from the Governor and elected stalwart conservative Dennis Hollingsworth as their new leader.
California is in economic…
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What is more dangerous: Radioactive waste from a former government nuclear weapons facility or a rotting wood floor? Apparently, it’s the floor. One is hard pressed to show that radioactivity as such sites poses a serious public health threat, but as, the Washington Post reports, a worker at one of the federal sites recently fell through a rotting floor, prompting a safety review at such sites and costing the federal government about $781 million or more. The post story also…
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The $800 billion stimulus package pushed through by Obama has ignited a trade war with Canada, reports the Washington Post. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”
A trade war is also underway…
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Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who has advised Obama, warns that “the barrage of tax increases proposed in President Barack Obama’s budget could, if enacted by Congress, kill any chance of an early and sustained recovery.” He compares Obama’s tax increases to the ones that contributed to the Great Depression and the “Lost Decade” of economic stagnation and decay in Japan.
Feldstein, who serves on Obama’s economic advisory board, has also “warned of serious inflation and higher taxes down the road” as a result of Obama’s policies.
Feldstein singles…
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Obama’s proposed tax increases create a massive financial penalty for married couples, by subjecting them to much higher income taxes than if they had chosen to live together without getting married. (Unmarried people voted decisively for Obama. But as the Associated Press notes, “married people tend to favor” Republicans like McCain).
Under the tax increases contained in Obama’s recent budget proposals, a married couple making $232,000 a year would be in a higher tax bracket than many unmarried couples making $370,000 a…
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