Renewable Fuel Standard

Last weekend the Senate rejected an amendment to the FY 2014 budget that would have enacted a carbon tax. For those interested in affordable energy and job creation, this was a good thing. Still, it’s worth walking through the actual wording of Senator Whitehouse’s amendment to see just how duplicitous it was. Even if someone knew nothing of the climate policy debate, the rhetorical sleight of hand in Whitehouse’s proposal should raise alarm bells. A Tax By Any Other Name Would Hurt...
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Often in the policy debates on government regulations, you will have free-market people decrying inefficient impediments to business, while the other side will tout the (alleged) benefits to the environment or whatever the social goal happens to be. Yet a new MIT study —from a group that is very sympathetic to carbon regulatory policies—documents how inefficient vehicle fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards are. Even if one buys into the premise that the government should be forcing businesses...

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A recent story in EnergyGuardian (sub. req'd) centered on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) support for the carbon “fee” bill introduced by his colleagues Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Fortunately, the newly-released NERA study gives us a quantitative estimate of how much their scheme would hurt the U.S. economy. The whole episode fulfills the warnings that many of us have been making during the carbon tax debate. Specifically, advocates of a carbon tax rely on a...

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A new study by NERA Economic Consulting, prepared for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), documents the economic dangers of a federal carbon tax. The study is very conservative in its assumptions (as I’ll explain below), giving the benefit of the doubt to the proponents of a carbon tax. Even so, there study reaches two conclusions: Either the US government sets a carbon tax low enough so that its economic impacts are simply bad, but not awful, in which case there are few...
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People who have watched environmental policy debates soon learn that the alarmist interventionists—the ones claiming that the government needs to act quickly in order to prevent catastrophe—are not afraid to throw around terrifying statistics that are absurd on their face. In a different forum, I walked through this phenomenon when it came to proposed regulations of mercury emissions from power plants. Susan Dudley, of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center,...
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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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  Can you imagine a prosperous America that utilizes its domestic energy resources to fuel a dynamic economy, jobs and technological innovation? President Obama doesn’t appear to imagine a future of plentiful energy resources. Instead, the President perpetuates the myth that America is strapped for energy with only 2% of the world’s proven oil reserves and leads an Administration that is more hostile to American energy development than any in recent history. Unfortunately for the...
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  American refineries are closing and more closures are likely, often because of overly-burdensome regulation as well as lower gasoline demand. Several refineries in Pennsylvania are idle and possibly closing if no buyers come forward. The refining industry is one of the most highly regulated in the country and has been struggling for years to maintain minimal profit margins. In the face of even more regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who are, imposing...
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The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) is touting a new study claiming that ethanol reduced gasoline prices by more than a dollar per gallon in 2011. As with similar studies in the past, the methodology used here to calculate this number rests on a basic fallacy in how they frame the question, which we’ll explain below. Beyond framing the question incorrectly, there is the obvious point that ethanol has lower energy content than conventional gasoline . If ethanol really were efficient, it...

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  A recent study by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) found that two most prominent regulations affecting fuel use in the United States—the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards—have competing requirements that will have a negative impact on the more than 120,000 convenience stores that sell motor fuel around the country, as well as the Americans that frequent them. Under the RFS, which was set by Congress in 2005 and...
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