Emissions Standards

The ironic thing in the debate over carbon policies is that opponents of massive new federal taxes and regulations don’t need to go to obscure websites or ideological Think Tanks to get their talking points. On the contrary, those of us who are very wary of giving the government more power over the entire energy sector (and hence economy itself) just need to quote verbatim from the supporters of such policies. For example, the White House recently updated its estimate of the “social...
Continue Reading...

In a new study, the Heritage Foundation estimates that recent proposals to limit carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would be a cure worse than the disease. In particular, by the year 2100 the cumulative net damages to the world economy could exceed an astonishing $100 trillion, and in not a single year do the benefits exceed the costs. The Heritage analysis is based on a new approach to gauging the economic impacts from climate change. As the report explains:

A recent paper by...

Continue Reading...

The George C. Marshall Institute has released a new study from James DeLong outlining what it refers to as “the five circles of Carbon Tax Hell.” The study is very readable and concise (only 34 pages of main text), yet at the same time offers a comprehensive survey of the main problems with a carbon tax. Although DeLong uses colorful metaphors (such as “Carbon Tax Hell”), even so he wades into technical subtleties in the policy debate, and does a good job breaking them down for the...

Continue Reading...

Last weekend the Senate rejected an amendment to the FY 2014 budget that would have enacted a carbon tax. For those interested in affordable energy and job creation, this was a good thing. Still, it’s worth walking through the actual wording of Senator Whitehouse’s amendment to see just how duplicitous it was. Even if someone knew nothing of the climate policy debate, the rhetorical sleight of hand in Whitehouse’s proposal should raise alarm bells. A Tax By Any Other Name Would Hurt...
Continue Reading...

A recent story in EnergyGuardian (sub. req'd) centered on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) support for the carbon “fee” bill introduced by his colleagues Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Fortunately, the newly-released NERA study gives us a quantitative estimate of how much their scheme would hurt the U.S. economy. The whole episode fulfills the warnings that many of us have been making during the carbon tax debate. Specifically, advocates of a carbon tax rely on a...

Continue Reading...

A new study by NERA Economic Consulting, prepared for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), documents the economic dangers of a federal carbon tax. The study is very conservative in its assumptions (as I’ll explain below), giving the benefit of the doubt to the proponents of a carbon tax. Even so, there study reaches two conclusions: Either the US government sets a carbon tax low enough so that its economic impacts are simply bad, but not awful, in which case there are few...
Continue Reading...

People who have watched environmental policy debates soon learn that the alarmist interventionists—the ones claiming that the government needs to act quickly in order to prevent catastrophe—are not afraid to throw around terrifying statistics that are absurd on their face. In a different forum, I walked through this phenomenon when it came to proposed regulations of mercury emissions from power plants. Susan Dudley, of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center,...
Continue Reading...

  In a recent NYT op ed , Harvard Law professor and former Obama official Cass Sunstein cited Ronald Reagan, of all figures, as inspiration for more federal regulation on the transportation and energy sectors. Sunstein’s angle was to say that Reagan endorsed the cost/benefit analysis arguing for the US agreement to fight the “ozone hole,” and therefore Sunstein says, today’s conservatives should also support mandates on fuel efficiency and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions....
Continue Reading...

Earlier this week, the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI)at the New York University School of Law announced they were threatening EPA with a lawsuit to increase the price of gasoline and diesel through a cap-and-trade system. They claim they want to increase the price of transportation fuel to “address climate change,” but they omit the fact that if the United States stopped using gasoline today, it would have an incredibly minor effect on the climate. Specifically, the faculty at New...
Continue Reading...

  Bjorn Lomborg has a great article in Foreign Policy walking through the problems with a major new study warning of the need for government action on climate change in order to avoid millions (!) of deaths. Lomborg’s critique shows how the climate change debate, especially as it’s reported in the major media, is full of exaggerations and non sequiturs. Even though the advocates of massive new government regulations like to use the phrase “climate denier,” this has nothing to do...
Continue Reading...