Emissions Standards

  On Friday September 21, in its last action before the election, the House voted 233-175 to pass the provocatively titled “Stop the War on Coal Act” (H.R. 3409). Although it is given little chance of passing the Senate, the act contains several proposals to reduce federal constraints on energy production and job growth. The media have focused on the portions of the act that would change current policy. For example, here is the coverage in The Hill:

The legislation is a combination of...

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration played “a central role” in encouraging a private equity firm to rescue a struggling refinery in Pennsylvania. This is rather ironic since part of the reason for the refinery’s financial troubles were the Obama administration’s burdensome regulations. Earlier this year, refineries on the East Coast were struggling. Sunoco’s northeast refining business had lost over $900 million over the past three years and was...
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For years we at the Institute for Energy Research have highlighted the problems with the Obama administration’s corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) mandate. We have written comments to the administration (here and here ) and explained how raising the fuel economy standard will reduce safety, price drivers out of the market, and reduce automobile choice and mobility itself. Today Rep. Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a report entitled...
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WASHINGTON D.C. -- IER President Thomas Pyle issued the following statement upon today's release of the House Oversight Committee report, entitled "A Dismissal of Safety, Choice, and Cost: The Obama Administration's New Auto Regulations." The investigation -- led by Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) -- reveals how White House officials misled the American public and circumvented federal agencies in rulemaking for fuel economy standards. According to the report, the administration...
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  Recognizing that American motorists will reject any policies that raise fuel prices, the people pushing new regulations on the energy sector are trying to have their cake and eat it too. For example, a new report [.pdf] claims that a national Low Carbon Fuel Standard would not only reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but it would also lower fuel prices for consumers. This defies both economic theory and common sense, and a chart from the report itself will highlight the absurdity. The...
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  A new study put out by the Western States Petroleum Association concludes that California’s statewide cap-and-trade plan, known as AB32, would raise gasoline prices and shut down refineries. The study, performed by the Boston Consulting Group, affirms basic economics by realizing that government regulations will raise the cost of business and necessarily impact retail prices and jobs. This is a welcome dose of common sense in a sea of rhetoric arguing that climate change regulations...
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One of the few booming sectors in the U.S. economy is oil and natural gas. Domestic development has been helped by high worldwide prices for crude, but the improvements in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—have also been very important. In a new report, researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) estimate that the Eagle Ford shale alone generated $25 billion in economic activity in 2011 alone, in addition to creating over 47,000 jobs. These...

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The proponents of laissez-faire in energy markets keep winning argument after argument, but their critics keep moving the goalposts. For decades, Americans have been warned that they needed to wean themselves from oil because the U.S. would always be dependent on hostile foreign regimes. Now that new technological developments and further discoveries have shown that North America has centuries’ worth of fossil fuels, the argument is shifting. Now the alleged danger—“proving” that...

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  Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been known to say some wacky things. After the 9/11 attacks, he opined that they “could even do some economic good.” In 2002 he wrote that only a housing bubble could rescue the U.S. economy. After the tsunami, Krugman argued that the Japanese nuclear disaster “could end up being expansionary.” And this past August, Krugman went on CNN to claim that a fake alien invasion  could pull the world out of recession in...
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