Category Archives: energy

“Emergency Powers”

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 as an excuse to pour more of our tax dollars into his global warming foolishness. He’s using the Act to pump $169 million into nine projects across 15 sites nationwide in an effort to accelerate electric heat pump manufacturing. There are some serious problems with this. In no particular order:

Biden claims that heat pumps only use electricity; they don’t burn coal or oil or natural gas. That’s a disingenuously narrow view of the situation. Heat pumps do use only electricity at their point of use. However, that electricity comes from somewhere—primarily coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating stations. At the times the heat pumps are needed the most—in the depths of heating and cooling seasons—”green” energy sources generally aren’t available: at night, when the sun doesn’t shine; when the sky is overcast, and sunlight is limited; when the wind isn’t blowing enough or is blowing too strongly. This is a shortfall that’s disastrously exacerbated by Biden’s open effort to destroy our hydrocarbon-sourced energy industry. Oil-, natural gas-, and coal-fired power plants are reliable, efficient, and don’t care about sun or wind.

Further, heat pumps get increasingly inefficient where temperatures are routinely cold and where temperatures are routinely hot. They work, after all, by trying to pump heat (hence the name of the devices) from inside the house to the hot outside for cooling, or by trying to pump heat from the cold outside into the house for heating.

Another problem is that the Defense Production Act was passed to support government-managed manufacturing (for good or ill) during times of conflict. We’re not at war with anybody now, and haven’t been for a few years—not since the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan, when Biden made his panic-ridden exit from that. Using the Act as an excuse for funding global warming-related matters is an abuse of the Act that warrants its heavy modification, if not outright rescission.

Yet another problem flows from Biden’s claim that his invocation is to boost domestic production of these heat pumps, especially by domestic manufacturers.

These awards will grow domestic manufacturing, create good-paying jobs, and boost American competitiveness in industries of the future.

Yet he’s pouring those millions into companies like Copeland, Honeywell International, Mitsubishi Electric, and York International Corporation.

Mitsubishi is a Japanese company, headquartered in Tokyo. York is wholly owned by Johnson Controls, and Johnson, while claiming to be an American company, is headquartered and domiciled in Cork, Ireland. That’s a lot of “domestic” manufacturing money—our tax dollars—going to foreign companies. Even if they do the actual manufacturing in the US, they’ll be taking off their (significant) cuts in Tokyo and Cork on the way by.

Only Reliable Way to Enforce Lease Sales

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The 5th Circuit has ruled—correctly IMNSHO—that the Biden administration must sell oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico as existing law requires and get it done within the next 37 days.

That’s good news, but it’s insufficient since it lacks an enforcement mechanism. The only reliable enforcement mechanism under this Biden administration is to deem the leases currently applied for to be sold under the parameters provided in the lease applications and to deem future lease applications, until the 73 million acres in question are committed, similarly sold after 37 days, the court’s mandated time limit for getting the Gulf’s acreage leased out.

The court’s ruling can be read here.

Federalism and State Taxes

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A Wall Street Journal editorial opens with this:

One great benefit of America’s federalist Constitution is policy competition among the states. Voters in Florida don’t have to live under New York’s laws, and Americans and businesses can vote with their feet by moving across state lines.

The editors proceeded to a description of State-level tax laws and the mobility of us Americans and our businesses in leaving States with high taxes in favor of States with, often markedly, lower taxes. But that lede overstates the case.

Federalism applies, often, with State taxes, but State-level business regulations are a different matter. It’s only necessary to see the outsize impact on our auto industry, for instance, or our pork industry, that California’s regulations have on vehicle requirements and on how hogs must be raised to see the lack of federalism in our regulatory environment.

With specific regard to California’s fuel requirements, there’s this from the Federal government’s EPA:

The Clean Air Act allows California to seek a waiver of the preemption which prohibits states from enacting emission standards for new motor vehicles.

The Federal government has long granted that waiver, and during the Biden administration, the feds made their latest move—overtly to refuse to rescind the waiver, effectively nationalizing a State regulation at the expense of federalism.

On the California’s hog-raising regulation, the Supreme Court upheld that regulation, which mandated the minimum space in which hogs must be raised, anywhere in the United States, in order for them to be marketable in California. The Court nationalized this State-level regulation—again at the expense of federalism.

If we’re going to preserve our federalist structure of governance, federalism must be restored to State regulations, as well as State-level taxes. Don’t look for any of that to happen under any Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Federal government, though.

Mandating Supply in the Absence of Demand

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What could go wrong? Look at Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s mandate, through his Energy Department (run by the Secretary who thought it hilarious that we should—or could—produce more oil), that American automakers—Ford, GM, and Stellantis—make only battery cars by 2032. Along the way, look at his Energy Department’s proposed new rule:

The Energy Department in the spring proposed to eliminate the 6.67 multiplier….
Detroit auto makers would be slammed harder than foreign competitors by the regulatory changes because pick-ups and SUVs make up a larger share of their fleet sales. “The average projected compliance cost per vehicle for the D3 is $2,151, while non-D3 auto manufacturers only see an increase of $546 per vehicle,” the Big Three recently told the Energy Department.

That multiplier was an early regulation that made it possible to impute (however accurately or inaccurately) the miles per gallon achieved by internal combustion engines—itself subject to increasingly higher requirements under successive ED regulations—to the “mileage” achieved by battery cars. ED’s proposed rule change—under that D3 regime—essentially eliminates the mileage equivalent multiplier.

Combined with Biden’s requirement that our automakers make only battery cars by 10 (now 9) years from now, results in this outcome:

[U]nder the Energy Department’s proposal, it could make more sense to pay the government penalties than to increase production of EVs that don’t sell. This may be why GM is now throttling EV production, as Ford has also done.

It’s cheaper for the manufacturers to non-comply and pay the vig than it is for them to produce and pay the even bigger cost of not selling a government-required product the buyers—us ordinary Americans—don’t want and won’t buy.

And what does that preference for violating a law say about a culture of routine law-breaking?

Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate can’t even get Rule by Law right, much less live within the dreary and inconvenient process of operating within the law—Rule of Law. And we Americans pay the price of that.

Backwards

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden has given in to the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro administration.

The Biden administration struck a deal Wednesday with Venezuela in which its socialist government will allowing [sic] more competitive elections in exchange for the US easing sanctions on the Venezuelan oil and gas sector.

This is backwards. The Venezuelan government should be required to hold—successfully and without incident—free elections before the sanctions get lifted. This order of events only puts more money int the hands of the thugs running the nation.

Unfortunately, this sort of foolish trust of thugs is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party.