Category Archives: regulation

A Useful Move

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The Senate—at least the Republicans in the Senate; the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senators remain ensconced in their knee-jerk Nothing Republican mode—is working toward easing Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements by eliminating the penalties associated with failing to comply with ever-increasing and increasingly impossible fuel efficiency standards. Of course there are objections, but most of them are empty.

From the news writers’ own bias:

nullifying rules that for generations have pushed automakers to churn out ever cleaner and more fuel-efficient vehicles. That technology has saved two trillion gallons of gasoline over the past 50 years, according to the journal Energy Policy.

Ignored here, as the writers cite the journal, is the fact that cost of operation—fuel costs, for instance—remain a competitive selling point, and market forces will drive fuel efficiency. That drive will occur on us average Americans‘ schedule, though, instead of by government fiat. Car companies will continue to seek competitive advantages through such techs as turbocharged engines that deliver more power, transmissions with more gears and powertrains that automatically shut off at stoplights to conserve gasoline along with a host of other pathways, including some not yet thought of, but which competitive R&D will bring out.

Other objectors include Chris Harto, a Consumer Reports policy analyst:

Automakers have proven time and time again that without strong and enforceable fuel-economy standards, many of them will leave proven, popular, and cost-effective technologies like hybrids sitting and gathering dust on the shelf[.]

Aside from the fact that simple competitive pressures in a truly free market, shorn of excessive government regulation, will push “automakers” to continue to work toward, among other things, fuel efficiency. What Harto is ignoring, though, is that his favored vehicles are sitting on the shelf because consumers don’t want them and aren’t buying them.

And this:

Consumer advocacy groups warn that the move could result in…further dependence on foreign oil sources.

This is just disingenuous. The US is the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of it. What would be beneficial here would be a parallel move to deregulate oil production and refining (and exporting).

Also absent is any rationale for why we should care about gasoline savings of that magnitude. My back of the envelope estimation of how much that actually works out to is based on there being 105 million cars on the road in 1975 (those 50 years ago) and 299 million cars and now light trucks and SUVs (which burn gasoline and are much more ubiquitous than 50 years ago) on the road today. A naïve average of that is 201.5 million gasoline-burning vehicles on the road each year. 40 billion gallons of gasoline “saved” each year (those 2 trillion spread across the years) works out to 200 gallons “saved” per car per year.

To achieve that tiny savings, a ton of money has been spent on CAFE compliance rules, on building compliant and so very expensive vehicles, and on wasted money pushing those far more expensive CAFE-meeting vehicles out the factory door in order to meet the mandated manufacturer’s fleet average fuel efficiency numbers. This wastage includes, over the last several years, pushing battery cars and hybrids out the door only to sit unsold on dealer lots as us average Americans refuse to pay the enormous cost of those battery-dependent vehicles.

This is a good beginning, if the Republicans can pull it off, and the Republican caucus in the House goes along. Better would be elimination of CAFE altogether, that should be for a later day.

False Premise

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The Biden administration had argued, in the course of its participation in a lawsuit against Tennessee’s law barring transgender-based treatments for children, that

A teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot.

The Supreme Court last week issued its ruling that the Tennessee law was, in fact, perfectly fine; the ruling was 6-3, with the three activist Justices voting in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the Court’s opinion, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurrence centered on answering one of the objections in the dissent. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate concurrence in which he took to task all the plaintiffs’ demand that the Court knee-jerk accede to so-called experts in the Executive Branch regarding transgenderism.

However, it would have been good if the Court had addressed one more item—the Biden administration’s false premise underlying its argument.

That erroneous premise is this: that sex is assigned at birth. This is blatantly false. Sex is assigned at the moment of conception, when the male sperm, carrying either an X chromosome or a Y, joins with the egg and its X chromosome. The subsequent union, the zygote, is then deterministically a male with an XY combination or a female with an XX combination. That male or female—boy or girl—result is carried on through subsequent development all the way through fetus development and birth. The sex determination is immutably fixed at that first moment of union; it is not “assigned” later.

Had the Court put that underlying false premise to bed, also, would have obviated a myriad arguments (legal, anyway) about the origins of an individual’s transgender situation.

Resist

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That’s what the tech industry honchoes are doing vis-à-vis Republican moves to cut or eliminate altogether clean energy tax credits. They want to maintain their handouts.

The Data Center Coalition, a group that includes Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms, recently made its pitch in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD), according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The group asked him to preserve tax credits and loan funding that would be aggressively phased out in the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives last month.
The bill is fueling industry concerns about rising prices and power shortages if planned investments don’t materialize.

There’s this, too:

The House bill would require solar, wind, and other projects to begin construction within 60 days of the measure’s enactment to receive tax credits. It would also require the projects to come online by 2028, setting a hard cutoff for any projects placed in service after that year. Under current law, the tax credits phase out over four years, starting in either 2032 or when the US power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions fall to a quarter of their 2022 levels—whichever comes later.

Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t so much a rescission of the tax credits or removal of “loan funding” as it is a requirement that recipients not dilly-dally about their performance. To get/keep the credits and funding, they actually have to start doing the things—begin construction, for instance—required to “earn” the handouts. Then they have to stop slow-walking their performance, pocketing the money money without anything to show, and instead complete their promised project and bring their “clean-energy” facility on line by a date certain.

Their worry about rising prices and power shortages is a valid concern, but that’s not effectively addressed with tax credits or government loans for their projects. That’s effectively addressed by getting government regulations out of the way of fossil fuel-sourced energy. Natural gas is about as clean as it gets, even counting the fiction that atmospheric CO2—plant food—is a pollutant. Oil-based energy production is nearly as clean, as is modern coal-based energy. The actual pollutants from burning coal have long been cleaned up be well-established technologies.

Fossil fuel-sourced energy is lower priced in no small part because it’s utterly reliable, producing energy whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and those fossil fuel facilities need no expensive, themselves polluting from mining through disposal, battery storage that lasts only a very few hours into a long-term weather or night-time outage.

Clean energy facilities don’t need the tax credits or artificial government loans any more than do fossil fuel facilities. When they’re ready for market, the market will call for them without taxpayer money being donated to them. The proper resistance is a pushback and retention of the tax credit cuts and rescissions.

Ending a Market Distortion

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The Trump administration is moving to eliminate tax credits for buying battery cars. The Left and their news writers don’t like this.

The removal of the credit, created to incentivize US consumers to purchase electrified vehicles, would likely lead to a drop in EV sales and production.

NSS. The credit was created explicitly to “encourage” purchase of battery cars. On the other hand, Lauren Fix, a co-host of Talk 2 DIY Automotive, has this:

Getting rid of this $7,500 tax credit should not impact [Tesla] sales. People buy Teslas because they like the product…. They know what their customers want, and those that like Teslas will continue to purchase that product.

And [phrase substitutions in the original, emphasis added]

Once that tax credit goes away, I’m expecting [electric vehicles] to be about 2% of sales. There will still be electric vehicle sales, Tesla will still survive, and [Elon Musk] will do well. And other brands will make what consumers want.

There’re hints there. Get rid of government-created market distortions, and the market will produce economically viable products at far less cost without our tax dollars added in. That product mix will include plenty of battery cars as soon as they become technologically and economically viable—and are what us consumers want at prices we’re willing to pay without taxpayer handouts.

Cynicism…

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…is alive and well in California. This is illustrated by the California Interscholastic Federation’s decision to increase the number of girls eligible to participate in State high school athletic tournaments while continuing to allow biological males—boys—to participate in those same girls’ tournaments.

[A]ny biological female student-athlete who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their Section’s automatic qualifying entries in the CIF State meet, and did not achieve the CIF State at-large mark in the finals at their Section meet, was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships[.]

Tl;dr translation: any girl who lost to a boy in an earlier stage of the competition will be granted the opportunity to compete and lose again to the same boy in the next stage.

The cynicism is made explicit by this remark by California’s Progressive-Democrat Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon:

CIF’s proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness—a model worth pursuing.

No. There’s nothing respectful, reasonable, or fair in allowing boys to participate in girls’ sports.