The American Energy Alliance urges all Senators to oppose cloture on the substitute amendment to H.R. 3684.
The substance of the amendment is poor policy and a bad use of taxpayer resources. The subsidies for electric vehicles and charging are not the responsibility of the federal government. The tens of billions of dollars for unneeded and impractical passenger rail will only fuel more wasteful white elephants to accompany California’s ongoing high-speed rail fiasco. The tens of billions of dollars more to mass transit systems whose ridership have collapsed is yet more waste. The tens of billions in subsidies for electricity transmission is simply not needed. The amendment also layers on billions in questionable spending in pursuit of central planning of energy.
But beyond the bad policy in the infrastructure proposal itself, the legislation is inextricably linked to the multi-trillion dollar inflationary budget that the administration hopes to see passed through reconciliation. While the contents of the reconciliation bill are still vague, the energy taxes and tariffs reported to be included would be a disaster for the American economy. Its provisions will drive up the cost of energy and goods throughout the country, turbo-charging already persistently high inflation and exacerbating the challenges posed by federal deficits. Because of the linkage of the two pieces of legislation, a vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill makes passage of the inflation bill more likely. AEA therefore urges the Senate not to collude in raising energy prices for Americans.
The AEA urges all members to support free markets and affordable energy by voting NO on cloture substitute to H.R. 3684. AEA will include this vote in its American Energy Scorecard.
Key Vote NO on Cloture on the Substitute Amendment
Biden’s “Infrastructure” Bill Advances Green New Deal Provisions
Climate change central planning is found throughout the 2,700-plus page infrastructure bill that President Biden is touting as bipartisan. The Senate bill uses central planning to re-engineer the electric grid and to eliminate carbon from the U.S. economy by offering large subsidies. There is $21.5 billion to create the Energy Department’s new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which will provide for Secretary Granholm’s green-energy venture-capital fund. This funding should bring to mind the Obama Administration programs that funded with tax dollars companies that failed including Solyndra, A123 Systems, Fisker Automotive and other solar manufacturers. Granholm’s fund includes $2.4 billion for advanced nuclear reactor projects, $3.5 billion for carbon capture, $8 billion for “clean hydrogen” and $5 billion for projects that “demonstrate innovative approaches to transmission, storage, and distribution infrastructure to harden and enhance resilience and reliability.”
Ms. Granholm is also charged with creating a “smart” and “clean” grid that provides reliable electricity despite heavily federally subsidized, inherently intermittent renewable energy. The grid is the job of regional authorities, which coordinate wholesale markets with states and utilities—not the Feds. In addition to providing $9 billion for grid-balancing technologies, the bill “loans” the Department of Energy (DOE) $2.5 billion to enter “capacity contracts” with transmission developers that will backstop their projects if there is insufficient demand for renewable energy. The bill also allows DOE to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors” where there are constraints in delivering excess renewable energy to markets, which will allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to overrule states on power lines and their placement.
Transportation Secretary Buttigieg would receive $7.5 billion to rollout a national electric-vehicle charging network. The bill instructs Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation to finance chargers that “meet current or anticipated market demands” and “would be unlikely to be completed without Federal assistance.” Some politicians believe that building more chargers in low-income areas will encourage additional electric vehicle sales, despite no data documenting their belief. Faster chargers in denser population areas may also require grid capacity to be upgraded and could strain power supply, as was demonstrated in California, where electric vehicle owners were asked during heat waves to not charge their vehicles in the evenings when the sun goes down.
The infrastructure bill is also riddled with corporate welfare. United Airlines is investing in flying electric taxis, which will be eligible for federal loan guarantees. Kenworth and Toyota are rolling out hydrogen-powered trucks to transport freight. Exxon Mobil may receive funds for its experimental green technology program.
Funding for Disasters
The bill contains tens of billions of tax dollars that would be allocated against natural occurrences such as floods, wildfires, and drought, under the premise that they are climate-related. The bill covers the development of new sources of drinking water in areas where there is drought and it even funds the relocation of entire communities away from places that may be deemed vulnerable.
The Army Corps of Engineers would get an additional $11.6 billion in construction funds for projects such as flood control and river dredging, which is more than four times the amount the Corps received last year for construction. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s annual budget for a program that buys or elevates homes at risk from floods would more than triple to $700 million. Some of that money is designated for homeowners in areas considered especially vulnerable because of socioeconomic factors, including areas that house racial minorities. FEMA would also get an extra $1 billion for a grant program that is supposed to protect communities against all types of disasters, and another $733 million to make dams safer.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would get almost $100 million a year to help restore coastal habitats and protect coastal communities—five times what the program currently spends. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water supplies in the West, now gets $20 million a year for desalination projects, which remove minerals and salts from seawater to create freshwater, which would increase to $250 million over five years. It currently receives $65 million for water recycling that would increase to $1 billion for treating wastewater to make it available for new uses such as irrigation.
Other funding in the legislation would be directed toward new programs. The bill would give the Department of Agriculture $500 million for “wildfire defense grants to at-risk communities”—money that is supposed to help people make changes to their homes or landscape to make them less vulnerable to fire or other disasters. Other programs would not just fortify homes and facilities against disasters, but move them elsewhere.
The Department of Transportation would get almost $9 billion for a program to help states prepare highways for the effects of “climate change”—including relocating roads out of flood-prone areas. The Environmental Protection Agency would pay for communities to move drinking water pipelines and treatment facilities at risk from flooding or other extreme weather. Funding in the legislation would be available to move entire communities. The bill would provide $216 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for climate resilience and adaptation for tribal nations. More than half of that money, $130 million, would go toward “community relocation.”
Where is the Money Coming From?
Supporters of the bill indicate that the bill is “fully paid for.” But the bill’s text and analyses of it dispute that point. One source of funding for a multi-billion-dollar offset is to come from the improved recovery of fraudulent pandemic unemployment benefit payments, which some have estimated could total $400 billion or more. News accounts suggest as much as $50 billion in savings might be found by better recovery of those misspent funds, but there is no policy in the bill for obtaining it.
Another source is supposed to be $53 billion from “savings” from states ending federal pandemic unemployment benefits sooner than expected. That provision is linked to “findings” language buried in the massive bill, which are typically statements of opinion without legislative or legal effect. The supposed savings, however, have “already occurred”, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).
Congress passed three major laws creating and subsequently extending pandemic unemployment benefits: the March 2020 CARES Act, which the Congressional Budget Office projected would provide $268 billion in benefits; the December 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was expected to add another $119 billion; and the March 2021 American Rescue Plan, which was estimated to add another $205 billion. Taking $53 billion off the total results in $539 billion. The latest Department of Labor tally of actual spending on those federal benefits through July 31, 2021 shows almost $630 billion spent on these temporary federal programs with over a month to go on the program. That is almost $90 billion more in deficit spending than the Congressional Budget Office projected in its three estimates.
The missing policies indicate that less than half of the bill’s overall costs are offset, according to CRFB. Offsets are running around $250 billion, which compares to $540 billion in new spending in the legislation. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office reported on August 5, 2021, that the bipartisan infrastructure bill would add more than $250 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade, confirming the above analyses that the massive legislation would not fully pay for itself.
Conclusion
Supposedly the Senate already has the votes to pass the bill and may even have 10 more than the 60 votes needed. From funding new endeavors like the ones that have failed under the Obama Administration—to funding relocations from areas that have for centuries had the risk of wildfires, drought and floods—the bill is using tax dollars to fund corporate welfare and, in some cases, the rich under the guise of benefitting racial minorities. The money for the bill is supposed to be offset from other programs, but the analyses above show that not to be true.
The expansive nature of the bill can be seen from a provision that would require auto manufacturers to equip “advanced alcohol monitoring systems” in all new cars. The section titled, “ADVANCED IMPAIRED DRIVING TECHNOLOGY,” mandates new vehicles include “a system that … passively and accurately detect[s] whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration” of .08, in which case the system would “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.” Automobile manufacturers would have a three-year grace period to comply with the regulation.
Instead of an infrastructure bill, the product represents the old Washington, D.C., approach of distributing pork sufficient to buy votes of enough Senators to enable its passage. With a Budget Reconciliation Package estimated at more than $3.5 trillion waiting in the wings and expected to follow the trail blazed by this bill, Americans are paying for a very expensive fundamental transformation of the country, including the reliability and availability of our basic energy necessary for life.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
Say No To The Bloated “Infrastructure” Deal
After many months of discussion, we now have the text of a bipartisan infrastructure bill which some senators hope to rush through the Senate in just a week. The Democratic Party’s go-it-alone additional spending bill (beyond the regular budget), which they want to pass through reconciliation, is still undrafted, but Speaker Pelosi continues to promise it must pass side by side with the infrastructure bill. While the administration’s preposterous attempt to define every progressive spending priority as “infrastructure” was correctly laughed at, the infrastructure package that we have is still a bad deal. Even worse, by giving some bipartisan cover to some of the administration’s spending, a bipartisan infrastructure deal makes the passage of a blowout multi-trillion-dollar left-wing reconciliation package more likely.
Infrastructure Package
The proposed bill weighs in at a bloated 2,700 pages. While more focused on actual infrastructure than the Biden administration’s proposal from earlier this year, the package is still a wasteful and unnecessary $1 trilion. Perhaps most ridiculous is the $7.5 billion in subsidies for electric vehicle charging facilities. Why exactly federal taxpayers should be paying for this, rather than EV owners themselves, is not explained.
The package also includes tens of billions of dollars for passenger rail and mass transit. While at least meeting the definition of physical infrastructure, these subsidies for unused services should be cut off. Passenger rail simply does not make sense in a country as large and spread out as the U.S. The California high-speed rail fiasco of the last decade should have put to rest the passenger rail fantasy, but this package looks to shovel even more good money after bad.
Mass transit ridership cratered during the pandemic and has not recovered, and it may never recover.It is not smart to spend tens of billions more on something no one wants to use. Even if ridership recovers at some point, why should federal taxpayers be subsidizing the mass transit systems of large, wealthy cities? New York and Washington, DC should pay for their own excessively expensive systems.
The package also seeks to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing electricity transmission build-out. Stripped of context, this might sound like a reasonable idea, why not have “more resilient” transmission? But the context is that we already have a grid that is robust and well-suited for reliable, baseload electricity generation (which comes from nuclear, hydro, natural gas or coal). What the grid struggles to handle is the wild swings of generation from unreliable renewables like wind and solar. These sources are at the heart of the grid issues we have seen recently in California and Texas.
The only reason there is any need to build long-distance transmission is because of federal and state subsidies and mandates forcing unreliable wind and solar into the electricity system. Taxpayers are being told to pony up tens of billions of dollars in this infrastructure package (which is only a down payment, far more will be needed) in order to “solve” the transmission problems created by government in the first place.
The legislation also mixes in various subsidies and handouts for special interests. Six billion dollars in subsidies for nuclear power plants, subsidies for carbon capture projects, $25 billion to upgrades to benefit the airlines, $6 billion to figure out how to recycle EV batteries, and many more billions of taxpayers’ dollars are sprinkled around to everyone with a good lobbyist.
The Reconciliation Package
While the bipartisan infrastructure package contains plenty of bad policy on its own, the deal continues to be made even worse by the context of the reconciliation package that both President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continue to insist must pass with the infrastructure bill. The reconciliation bill, while its contents are still vague, is shaping up to be a disaster for the American economy. Its provisions will drive up the cost of energy and goods throughout the country, turbo-charging already high and growing inflation and exacerbating the challenges posed by monstrous federal deficits.
According to reporting, the reconciliation bill is set to contain a Civilian Climate Corps, a “clean electricity” mandate, subsidies for electric vehicles and renewable electricity, a tax on methane (natural gas) emissions, subsidies for weatherization, and most damagingly a border carbon tax. Most of these energy-related inclusions are designed to do one thing: increase the cost of energy.
A “clean electricity” mandate, however, defined, will increase the cost of electricity. A tax on methane emissions will increase the cost of natural gas and thus everything that natural gas is used for, like home heating. A border carbon tax would increase the cost of every good coming into the country. This tax would fall on food, clothing, construction materials like steel and wood, cars, electronics, anything and everything imported. All of these taxes would be paid by consumers, and would damage the poor, those on fixed incomes, and local institutions like schools and hospitals the most.
The Senate Should Just Say No
Even those components of the reconciliation package that don’t directly raise energy costs are expensive or harmful as a policy matter. There is a reason that the administration is trying to jam all these provisions through in a reconciliation package. The contents are harmful and unpopular, catering to the left-wing of the Democratic Party, not to America as a whole. These extreme policies cannot pass Congress through the regular legislative process or as stand-alone legislation, so the administration is playing this two-track game: a bipartisan infrastructure package for political cover, paired with a blowout $3.5 trillion collection of damaging left-wing policy.
Make no mistake: passing the infrastructure package makes the reconciliation package more likely to succeed. The Senate should not go along with this farce. The votes cannot be separated as a practical matter; a vote for the infrastructure package is as good as a vote for the reconciliation package, and all the energy taxes and inflation that come with it.
The Unregulated Podcast #46 Part 2: Tom and Mike Discuss Election Issues and The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill
On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast, Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna continue their discussions on election issues and the bipartisan bill on “infrastructure” issues.
Links:
- Biden: Our multi trillion dollar spending bills “will reduce inflation, reduce inflation, reduce inflation”
- As Herschel Walker eyes Senate run, a turbulent past emerges
- Democrats lose ground on school equity plans
- Dems fear turnout catastrophe from GOP voting laws
- Beijing thrusts long lists of demands at Biden administration
- In Radical Affront To Civil Liberties, The Government Is Branding Non-Violent Jan. 6 Defendants “Terrorists”
- U.S. coal gets boost from higher gas prices: Kemp
- U.S. GDP rose 6.5% last quarter, well below expectations
The Unregulated Podcast #46 Part 1: Tom and Mike Discuss New CDC Guidelines and The Gavin Newsom Recall Election
On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss new CDC guidelines published in the wake of the Delta Variant and the Gavin Newsom recall election taking place in California.
Links:
- BIDEN: Where’s mom? Mom? Is she here? … Mom, you can’t stand up if you’re home.
- Fauci highlight reel
- What Larry Elder’s Capaign Means for Conservatives
- Larry Elder website
- Australian News on Joe Biden
- Joe Biden rambles: “Whether or not there’s a man on the moon”
- Biden rambling reel
- Biden: Our multi trillion dollar spending bills “will reduce inflation, reduce inflation, reduce inflation”
- ‘We Need Our Kids To Breathe’: DeSantis Vows No Mask Mandates As Major US Cities Clamp Down While COVID-19 Cases Rise
- Cal Worthington rides an Elephant 1985 TV commercial
- Pretty safe bet that Joe Biden will be the last US President who is old enough to have once been mocked by Johnny Carson
Key Vote NO on Cloture to Proceed to Infrastructure Vehicle
The American Energy Alliance urges all Senators to oppose cloture on proceeding to the vehicle for the proposed bipartisan infrastructure bill.
This announced deal is poor policy and a bad use of taxpayer resources. The subsidies for electric vehicles and charging are not the responsibility of the federal government. The tens of billions of dollars for unneeded and impractical passenger rail will only fuel more wasteful white elephants to accompany California’s ongoing high-speed rail fiasco. The tens of billions of dollars more to mass transit systems whose ridership have collapsed is yet more waste. The tens of billions in subsidies for electricity transmission is simply not needed.
On top of all this unneeded spending, the infrastructure bill does not address the biggest problems we have building infrastructure in this country — the permitting and regulatory processes that slow projects to a crawl and make American infrastructure projects far more expensive than in other countries.
But beyond the bad policy in the infrastructure proposal itself, the legislation is inextricably linked to the multi-trillion dollar inflationary budget that the administration hopes to see passed through reconciliation. While the contents of the reconciliation bill are still vague, the energy taxes and tariffs reported to be included would be a disaster for the American economy. Its provisions will drive up the cost of energy and goods throughout the country, turbo-charging already persistently high inflation and exacerbating the challenges posed by federal deficits. Because of the linkage of the two pieces of legislation, a vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill makes passage of the inflation bill more likely. AEA therefore urges the Senate not to collude in raising energy prices for Americans.
The AEA urges all members to support free markets and affordable energy by voting NO on cloture on the MTP to the infrastructure vehicle. AEA will include this vote in its American Energy Scorecard.
The Unregulated Podcast #45: Tom and Mike Discuss The Battle Over Infrastructure
On this episode of The Unregulated Podcast Tom Pyle and Mike McKenna discuss the brewing Congressional battle surrounding the Democrat’s “infrastructure” package and related legislation.
Links:
Biden Lied To Energy Workers
Workers are finding out that the solar and wind jobs that President Biden proclaimed would be high-paying union jobs are not living up to the sales pitch. Traditional energy industry jobs need skilled labor. For example, building an electric plant powered by fossil fuels usually requires hundreds of electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, and boilermakers who typically earn more than $100,000 a year in wages and benefits when they are unionized. According to the New York Times, Biden’s jobs are more “akin to an Amazon warehouse or a fleet of Uber drivers: grueling work schedules, few unions, middling wages and limited benefits.” On solar farms, workers are often nonunion construction laborers who earn an hourly wage in the upper teens with modest benefits. According to Jim Harrison, the director of renewable energy for the Utility Workers Union of America, “The cleantech industry is incredibly anti-union. It’s a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organize.”
To deal with the job situation, Mr. Biden has proposed federal subsidies to plug abandoned oil and natural gas wells, build electric vehicles and charging stations and speed the transition to renewable energy. For example, the White House wants Americans to believe that vastly increasing the number of wind and solar farms could produce over half a million jobs a year over the next decade — primarily in construction and manufacturing. The irony of the situation is that solar panels and wind turbines are mainly manufactured outside of the United States (think China), whose prices are less than those for U.S.-manufactured panels and turbines. Europe has 3 wind turbine manufacturers in the top ten while the United States has only one company in the list of the top ten wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers in the world.
Included in the table below are the solar panel manufacturers with the largest global market share in 2020, based on sales in 2019.
Further, it takes far more people to operate a coal, natural gas- or nuclear-powered electric plant than it takes to operate a wind farm, and many solar farms often can operate without a single worker on site.
Comparison of a Traditional Plant Closing and a New Renewable Plant
In 2023, a coal- and natural gas-powered plant (D.E. Karn) is scheduled to shut down. The plant’s 130 maintenance and operations workers, who are represented by the Utility Workers Union of America and whose wages begin around $40 an hour plus benefits, are supposedly guaranteed jobs at the same wage within 60 miles at the Assembly Solar site in Michigan. But the union, which has lost nearly 15 percent of the 50,000 national members that it had five years ago, indicates that many will have to take less appealing jobs because the utility, Consumers Energy, does not have nearly enough renewable energy jobs to absorb all the workers.
According to the head of the carpenters union in Michigan, the construction of a new fossil fuel plant in the state employs hundreds of skilled tradespeople who typically make at least $60 an hour in wages and benefits. About two-thirds of the roughly 250 workers employed on a typical utility-scale solar project, however, are lower-skilled, and get paid “around $20” per hour, depending on the market, and those jobs are generally nonunion. Solar construction is like a moving assembly line. But, instead of the product moving down the line, the people move, replicating the process over and over again across 1,000 or 2,000 acres. Some might equate it to manual harvesting in agriculture.
Another Reason for Lower Wages in Wind and Solar Projects
While utilities have traditionally built their own coal- and natural gas-powered plants, they usually purchase wind and solar energy from other companies through power purchase agreements. When utilities build their own plants, their labor costs get embedded in their rate of return, which is set by regulators — around 10 percent of their initial investment a year, according to securities filings. However, when a solar farm is built and owned by another company, that company needs to keep costs down because a lower price helps secure the purchase agreement, on which the company’s revenue is based.
Conclusion
Utility jobs are more likely to be unionized than green energy jobs, and union representation is correlated with higher wages and benefits. Utility jobs are associated with traditional technologies—coal, natural gas, hydroelectricity, and nuclear. Solar and wind jobs are usually procured by companies that are not utilities and that rely on purchase power agreements for their revenue. President Biden’s belief that there will be many renewable jobs and that they will be unionized does not comport with recent data. In fact, most of the top manufacturing firms of solar panels and wind turbines are outside of the United States, mainly in China. Americans need to realize that under Biden’s plan of moving away from conventional sources of energy to so-called “green energy,” we will end up outsourcing our good American jobs and benefitting China in the process.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.
Democrats Reveal Plan To Intentionally Raise The Price Of Everything
Democratic lawmakers have devised a plan to impose a border tax on imported goods that is based on the exporting countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Although details are scarce, the New York Times ran an article Monday which provides a broad outline of the border tax explaining that it would “require companies that want to sell steel, iron, and other goods to the United States to pay a price for every ton of carbon dioxide that is emitted during their manufacturing processes. If countries can’t or won’t do that, the United States could impose its own price.”
This proposal follows a similar plan that came out of the European Union last week. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board explained, under that plan, “foreign firms would have to undertake detailed carbon audits to report emissions to EU regulators, and then would have to work out what proportion of the emissions attributable to goods shipped to the EU already were covered by carbon taxes elsewhere. If a company isn’t able to complete such complex and expensive calculations, its carbon tariff will be estimated on the basis of the emissions of the dirtiest 10% of European producers for the same good.”
Over at Reason Magazine, Eric Boehm has a good summary of why carbon border taxes aren’t a good idea. In short, these taxes would raise prices on imported goods, hurting low-income and middle-class consumers of those products. As my colleague Jordan McGillis explains at the American Spectator:
Democrats will try to sell this new tax as a way to save American jobs, but as has long been understood, tariffs deliver concentrated economic benefits to the powerful incumbents who lobby for them while spreading new costs across the wider population. Far from being an economically just approach, the carbon border tax would further enrich existing companies while taxing American households.
Furthermore, these taxes will expand the federal bureaucracy to a point where the whole project is likely to devolve into cronyism. As economist Dan Mitchell explains:
It’s always a bad idea to give politicians a new source of revenue. But it’s a worse idea to give them a new source of revenue that will require bureaucrats to measure the amount of carbon produced by every imported good. As I pointed out a few days ago when discussing the European Union’s version of this protectionist scheme, that’s a huge recipe for cronyism and favoritism.
And as the WSJ’s editorial page pointed out when discussing the EU’s plan for carbon border taxes, these taxes are likely to lead to retaliation from trade partners and pushback at the World Trade Organization.
To those points I would add that if this proposal exempts the poorest countries from being taxed, then the whole rationale for the policy is greatly undermined as those countries are likely to emit more carbon dioxide in the future as they develop. On the other hand, if the proposal does include carbon border taxes on the poorest countries, then people who claim to care about the world’s poor cannot support this proposal because penalizing carbon emissions from developing countries deprives them of a path out of poverty by denying them access to affordable and reliable energy. And at the political level, taxing your own citizens to try to influence environmental policy in other parts of the world feels like the type of thing that is likely to create some sort of political backlash.
One final point that needs to be made is that these proposals for carbon border taxes are problematic for carbon tax advocates writ large who frequently ignore public choice objections to their ideal proposals. Carbon border taxes are usually proposed by carbon tax advocates as an additional element to correct for problems with domestic carbon tax policies. One of the many problems with carbon taxes is that by only raising taxes on domestic emitters of carbon dioxide, policymakers simply shift that economic activity to other parts of the world where those policies don’t exist, thereby thwarting the stated goal of reducing carbon emissions. This shift is also known as carbon leakage. Proponents of carbon taxes argue that carbon border taxes are also needed to correct for the problem of carbon leakage by bringing foreign production costs in line with domestic carbon tax policies.
All of that sounds great in theory but look at what climate policy is actually producing in practice: carbon cronyism and protectionism in the form of carbon border taxes rather than your perfectly formulated carbon tax. Perhaps that’s because the only way to make climate policy palatable amongst Republicans in the real world is by formulating it in a way where politicians can sell these costly policies as attempts to punish foreign competition.
In the end, carbon border taxes are another way for politically connected companies to protect themselves from foreign competition while the government increases its revenue by claiming to save American jobs and the environment. All of that comes with a cost to the everyday consumer in the form of higher prices.
*This article was adapted from content originally published by the Institute for Energy Research.