Tag Archives: politics

A Thought on Gasoline Production

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I had one. Take a breath.

California citizens pay a far higher price for a gallon of gasoline than even the average nation-wide: $5.79 against $4.29. Most of that difference comes from California’s State-unique regulations imposing, for instance, a low-carbon fuel standard and cap-and-trade taxes.

Separate from President Joe Biden’s (D) war on fossil fuel-sourced energy inflating the price of energy generally and gasoline in particular, that California price-inflating set of requirements also inflates the cost of gasoline nationally, since refiners are reluctant to produce separate kinds of gasoline for separate markets. Which brings me to my thought.

Refiners should produce a single type of gasoline related to carbon content, cap-and-trade taxes, and other froo-froo, based on the lower levels of regulatory interference in the rest of the nation, and sell that gasoline virtually nation-wide. Then they should offer to sell that single type to California buyers together with license(s) so those buyers can to modify the refiners’ product as they wish to bring that gasoline to within California desires.

In this way, drivers in the other 49 States would get a lower cost fuel from the refiners’ not having to impose some of that California cost on the rest of us, and the refiners would be able to recoup in the form of license fees most, if not all, of the putative costs of not selling directly into the California driver market.

It’s a Start

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The House, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority—424-8—passed a bill that would strip Russia and its satrap Belarus of Most Favored Nation status. The bill, if passed by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden (or his veto overridden), would allow us to

raise tariffs on goods from Russia and Belarus and give President Biden power to impose even stricter import taxes on their exports amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. …
The bill also sets up strict guidelines for when the president can restore normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus based on the state of the Ukraine war.
The Biden administration will additionally be obligated to push for Russia’s removal from the World Trade Organization and oppose Belarus joining the group, which would subject both to higher tariffs and steeper trade barriers.

Eight Republicans voted against the bill; their concerns centered in part on their push to make President Joe Biden’s Executive Order barring importation of Russian oil statutory by including that in the bill.

The more we pile economic burdens onto Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities Putin’s barbarians are perpetrating on Ukrainians, the better. However, we need to keep such moves in perspective: they’ve forced Putin to withdraw zero battalions from Ukraine, and they forced Putin to drop zero fewer bombs, rockets, or missiles on Ukrainian women, children, hospitals, schools,…. Weapons, ammunition, and medicines need to flow freely and rapidly to the Ukrainian military.

Political Disapproval of Private Enterprise Production

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are touting the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin from the nomination to the Federal Reserve Board’s Vice Chairman position, laying that defeat off to this:

But Ms Raskin’s most significant opponent was her oft-expressed view that the Fed and other regulators should deny credit to companies that produce or heavily consume fossil fuels.

It’s good that this one failed, but it’s just an early skirmish.

The problem is broader than this. It’s dangerous to our republican democracy that anyone would be nominated to the Fed or to any Executive Branch position who would willingly abuse that position’s authority to discriminate against any government-disapproved American enterprise.

Silence is Violence

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The Ukrainian industrialist and philanthropist, Victor Pinchuk, has a simple plea for the West:

We thank you for the food, the money, the sympathy and the painted blue-and-yellow flags. But if you want to save us, Ukraine needs planes, antiaircraft and antitank missiles, armed drones, and other weapons of war. So I beg our friends in the West: please give Ukraine the planes and other weapons it needs—now. Stop buying coal and oil from Russia. Don’t think about it; don’t evaluate options; don’t consider. Just do it. Time is life.

What he said.

What is that Leftist slogan? Silence is violence. More to the point for Biden-Harris and the persons leading NATO and the EU, so is dithering.

Such Naivete

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Douglas Feith and John Hannah want, not so much a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as much an air bridge via which to fly in humanitarian materials—food, meds, etc—and to fly out civilians wishing to evacuate the nation. They actually think such a facility would put useful pressure—or inconvenient choices—on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin would either consent and facilitate distribution of supplies or provoke more denunciations of Russia for its inhumanity. Even if criticism doesn’t move him, his top lieutenants may worry about their image and their vulnerability to war-crimes trials. This proposal may aggravate whatever divisions exist within Mr Putin’s team and trigger further antiwar sentiment among ordinary Russians.

This is incredibly naive, bordering on disingenuous, which is disappointing in Feith particularly.

Putin cares not a fig about denunciations; criticism won’t move him. Putin’s top lieutenants are in those positions because Putin chose them; they’re not going to fold because foreigners say mean things about them.

Antiwar sentiment among ordinary Russians? Quite possibly. But Feith and Hannah seem to have missed the fact that this is a tsarist Russia, not any sort of democracy or republic, or even enlightened dictatorship. Putin is the Tsar, and the people have no power at all unless and until they take to the streets as a population. They did that in the later days of the collapse of the USSR, but Yeltsin and Gorbachev were much more…civilized…than Putin is today.

And what war crimes trials? Do Feith and Hannah really envision a Western occupation of Russia when its invasion of Ukraine is ended? That’s the only way that there will be any chance at all of rounding up Putin and/or his minions. Of course, they may well be tried and convicted in absentia, but such things are cynically empty gestures; Putin and his lieutenants still will be sitting in their dachas enjoying their little water and their girls.

Do the flights, certainly, but when they’re shot down by Putin’s military—as surely they will be just as the humanitarian ground corridors to which Putin pretends to agree are attacked as soon as those corridors are filled—more concrete responses from the US and NATO will be required than just angry finger-wagging and stern press releases.