Author Archive
Gingrich & Woolsey on Energy
The other day, The Wall Street Journal provided a public service by lambasting Newt Gingrich for his absurd speech to the ethanol lobby in Des Moines last month (money line: ”Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’”). Today, Gingrich and fellow ethanol-maven James Woolsey struck back in those very same pages. In doing so, Gingrich provided yet more evidence that he’s intellectually unfit for office.
“It is in this country’s long-term best interest,” he said, ”to stop the flow of $1 billion a day overseas.” Really? So money sent overseas is gone forever. News to me. The only thing you can buy with dollars earned from oil sales to the U.S. is to buy things denominated in dollars or to exchange them so that someone else can. And we sell a lot of stuff to foreigners that are denominated in dollars (treasury bills for one) and that money comes right back to the good old U.S. of A.
But put that aside. If Gingrich really believes this, then why not just ban all imports all together? Is that what the GOP is about these days – rank gooberism on trade?
Oil Import Make Believe
A conversation with documentarian Robert Stone regarding Earth Day is featured today in The New York Times’s “Dot Earth” online column. In the course of his conversation with the Times’s Andrew Revkin, Mr. Stone — who is quite alarmed about our reliance on foreign oil — asks: “How many Americans know that we send about $800 billion to the Middle East every year for oil?”
Hopefully, not many. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. spent $95.4 billion on crude oil imports from OPEC sources in 2009. But not all OPEC members are from the Middle East. That $95.4 billion includes dollars spent on oil originating from Algeria ($6.3 billion), Angola ($9 billion), Ecuador ($3.4 billion), Nigeria ($17.7 billion), and Venezuela ($23.4 billion) – none of which are in the Middle East. Subtract out that oil and we arrive at $35.6 billion spent on Middle Eastern crude oil (a figure rounded from the original nominal counts. I have used the customs value – that is, the estimated value — of the oil being imported rather than the figures that include additional costs for insurance and transportation because money being spent on insurance and shipping goes to third parties that are not for the most part located in the Middle East. But if one wants to use those slightly higher figures, it won’t change the numbers very much at all).
For what it’s worth, the total amount of dollars Americans sent abroad for crude oil from all sources was $188.5 billion last year.
Even if the figure were $800 billion, so what? No one is forcing refineries to buy crude oil from foreign suppliers. They presumably believe that the oil at issue is more valuable than the money that must be offered to secure said oil and that oil from other sources is more expensive than oil from the Middle East. Hence, they buy. This is by definition a wealth creating transaction for American business enterprises. Foreign trade, Mr. Stone, is a good thing.
The implicit claim, of course, is that there are negative externalities associated with foreign oil consumption. This, however, is faith masquerading as fact (an argument also well made by Cato adjunct scholar Richard Gordon).
Regardless, Mr. Stone overstates the alleged problem by orders of magnitude.
Atomic Dreams
Last week I was on John Stossel’s (most excellent) new show on Fox Business News to discuss energy policy — in particular, popular myths that Republicans have about energy markets. One of the topics I touched upon was nuclear power. My argument was the same that I have offered in print: Nuclear power is a swell technology but, given the high construction costs associated with building nuclear reactors, it’s a technology that cannot compete in free markets without a massive amount of government support. If one believes in free markets, then one should look askance at such policies.
As expected, the atomic cult has taken offense.
Now, it is reasonable to argue that excessive regulatory oversight has driven up the cost of nuclear power and that a “better” regulatory regime would reduce costs. Perhaps. But I have yet to see any concrete accounting of exactly which regulations are “bad” along with associated price tags for the same. If anyone out there in Internet-land has access to a good, credible accounting like that, please, send it my way. But until I see something tangible, what we have here is assertion masquerading as fact.
Most of those who consider themselves “pro-nuke” are unaware of the fact that the current federal regulatory regime was thoroughly reformed in the late 1990s to comport with the industry’s model of what a “good” federal regulatory regime would look like. As Oliver Kingsley Jr., the President of Exelon Nuclear, put it in Senate testimony back in 2001:
The current regulatory environment has become more stable, timely, and predictable, and is an important contributor to improved performance of nuclear plants in the United States. This means that operators can focus more on achieving operational efficiencies and regulators can focus more on issues of safety significance. It is important to note that safety is being maintained and, in fact enhanced, as these benefits of regulatory reform are being realized. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and this Subcommittee — can claim a number of successes in their efforts to improve the nuclear regulatory environment. These include successful implementation of the NRC Reactor Oversight Process, the timely extension of operating licenses at Calvert Cliffs and Oconee, the establishment of a one-step licensing process for advanced reactors, the streamlining of the license transfer process, and the increased efficiency in processing licensing actions.
It’s certainly possible that the industry left some desirable reforms undone, but it seems relevant to me that the Nuclear Energy Institute — the trade association for the nuclear energy industry and a fervent supporter of all these government assistance programs — does not complain that they’re being unfairly hammered by costly red-tape.
For the most part, however, the push-back against the arguments I offered last week has little to do with this. It has to do with bias. According to a post by Rod Adams over at “Atomic Insights Blog,” I am guilty of ignoring subsidies doled-out to nuclear’s biggest competitor — natural gas — and because Cato gets money from Koch Industries, it’s clear that my convenient neglect of that matter is part of a corporate-funded attack on nuclear power. Indeed, Mr. Adams claims that he has unearthed a “smoking gun” with this observation.
Normally, I would ignore attacks like this. This particular post, however, offers the proverbial “teachable moment” that should not be allowed to go to waste.
Obama Knows the Drill
President Obama should be credited—albeit cautiously—for his announcement yesterday that he will open some U.S. coastal waters to offshore oil drilling. The fact that this is an interesting political reversal on Obama’s part has been treated extensively elsewhere. But what of the substance of the president’s drilling proposal?
I and other free-market advocates have spoken for years of the potential energy benefits of allowing this drilling, so I won’t devote too much space to repeating myself. The best encapsulation of my own thinking on the subject is this piece I wrote for the LA Times in 2008.
A few points worth adding:
Obama’s press conference at Andrews Air Force Base yesterday did indicate a welcome new direction for U.S. energy policy. But in an absolutely perfect world, the government would not be in the business of allocating scarce resources—in this case, the offshore oil fields—to competing user groups. The market would play that role.
Hence, the best policy would be to divest this land via auction and allow environmentalists, recreationalists and preservationists to compete with oil and gas companies for the rights to those resources.
It is not at all inconceivable to me that those opposed to drilling, whatever their reasons, might well out-bid extraction industries for rights to some of these fields. Unfortunately, there seems to be limited political support for privatization, so President Obama’s initiative is probably better than the status quo.
We need to remember, however, that if governments could intelligently allocate scarce resources across the economy without recourse to market information or institutions, then the North Korean economy would work swimmingly.
Radioactive Corporate Welfare
A good default proposition regarding the government’s role in the economy would state that the government should not loan money to an enterprise if the enterprise in question cannot find one single market actor anywhere in the universe to loan said enterprise a single red cent. It might suggest – I don’t know – that the investment is rather … dubious.
Alas, like all good propositions regarding the government’s role in the economy, this one is being left by the roadside by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, the only complaint being made by a not insubstantial segment of the political Right – frequently, the political crowd that is busy decrying “Bailout Nation” – is that the loan guarantees are not fat enough.
I write, of course, about the $8.3 billion federal loan guarantee announced by President Obama this week for Southern Company to build two new nuclear power plants. The money will be used to guarantee the loans being made by the federal government (via the Federal Financing Bank) to partially cover the cost of Southern’s projected $14 billion nuclear construction project at their Vogtle plant near Waynesboro, Georgia. The loan guarantees were authorized by Congress in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and, we are told, are the first installment on a total package of $54 billion that the President would like to hand out to facilitate the construction of 7-10 new nuclear power plants (Congress, however, has only authorized $18.5 billion to this point).
The claim being made by some – that the loan guarantees are necessary to jump-start investor interest in new nuclear power plant construction – is not quite correct. Even these lavish loan guarantees aren’t enough to do that. In a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy dated July 2, 2007, six of Wall Street’s s then-largest investment banks – Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – informed the administration that, contrary to the government’s expectations, anything short of a 100 percent unconditional guarantee would be insufficient to induce private lending.
Why is it risky to build nuclear power plants? Because new nuclear projects tie up more capital for longer periods of time than its main competitor, natural-gas fired generation. Nuclear power makes economic sense only if natural gas prices are very high. Then, over time, the high initial costs of nuclear power would be offset by nuclear power’s lower fuel costs. Moreover, as noted by Moody’s in an analysis published in July of last year, there is uncertainty associated with construction costs, regulatory oversight, technological developments that might reduce the cost of rival facilities, and the ability of utilities to recover costs and make a profit over the lifetime of the plant – a risk tied up in the economic prospects of the region being served by the plant. And those risks have been increasing, not decreasing, as time has gone on.
The President’s New Cars
I had an op-ed yesterday in USA Today about President Obama’s proposed new fuel-economy standards. Don’t like ‘em. Unfortunately, an editing snafu over at the newspaper inadvertently left out the fact that there are four models at present that meet the proposed new standard — the 2010 Honda Insight (41 mpg) and the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid (39 mpg) were left off the list.
Space prohibited me from making an additional point. Even if there is no rebound effect, my colleague Pat Michaels finds that global temperatures will only be reduced by 0.005 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.0078 degrees Celsius by 2100 once you plug those emissions reductions into the computer models used by the IPCC. Of course, proponents contend that U.S. action on fuel efficiency will lead to like action abroad. Well, good luck with that. But even if all of the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol adopted Obama’s proposed fuel-economy standards, global temperatures would be reduced by only 0.038 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.071 degrees Celsius by 2100. If you tried to monetarize those benefits, you would be hard pressed to come up with an defensible number of consequence.
So what should be done instead? Nothing. At the risk of sounding politically irrelevant, there is no good case for the government to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption via fuel economy standards or fuel taxes; an argument I made at length in a study I co-authored almost two years ago with my colleague Peter Van Doren.
[Cross-posted at The Corner]
Obama Administration Agrees with Cato on Auto Fuel Efficiency
Well, sort of. The Obama administration signaled last week their belief that it would be better to have one national fuel efficiency standard than a multiplicity of different state fuel efficiency standards. Now, we have long maintained that fuel efficiency standards — federal or state — are a bad idea. Consumers should be free to buy whatever sort of car they want without government economic coercion. But if we must do violence to consumer sovereignty, better to do so via one national standard rather than via a hodge-podge of differing state standards.
This is the very argument I made late in January over at The New York Times when asked about California’s petition to establish its own fuel efficiency standard as a means of addressing greenhouse gas emissions. Alas, I was pilloried on the NYT comments board at that time for all sorts of sins against man and nature. Now it appears that President Obama has come over to the dark side. Welcome to my world, Mr. President.
David Brooks — An Update
After carefully transcribing and then posting the nearly indecipherable argument forwarded yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered by David Brooks, I thought, well, even the smartest people in the world can make a verbal hash of things when put on the spot with a live radio or television interview. I had a nagging feeling that there must have been a well-thought-ought perspective knocking around in those words somewhere. Was I being unfair to the man?
And this morning — what do you know! — I open up Friday’s New York Times (I didn’t get to it yesterday) and see an op-ed length treatment of the very argument Brooks tried to make on NPR. Alas, even when Brooks had a couple of days to think about each and every word, he still managed to be only a smidge less opaque than on NPR.
David Brooks: Thumbs Up for the Housing Bailout
On Friday’s All Things Considered, New York Times columnist David Brooks was dismissive of Rick Santelli’s now-celebrated rant against President Obama’s housing bailout. Brookes conceded that there was a “fundamental unjustice [sic]” associated with the bailout, but…
We’re not just individuals; we have a system, a system we all share. And the system right now is so unsteady that we have no individual responsibility in our own system because the economy is so unsteady. If you deserve a job sometimes you get laid off, if you don’t deserve, sometimes you don’t get laid off. And the government’s fundamental responsibility right now is to make sure the system is stable. And that may reward people who took unnecessary risks but we just have to live with that. The primary responsibility here is not to worry about the moral hazard; it’s to keep the stability of the system as a whole intact. And I think that the housing plan is a pretty moderate and respectable way to go about that.
If you can figure out what the heck Brooks is saying here, my hat’s off to you. As best as I can tell, Brooks is arguing that the economy is in free fall and the only way to arrest the collapse is to stop the foreclosures. If that means bailing out the irresponsible, then bail them out we must. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying.
But do foreclosures equal macroeconomic collapse? It’s not obvious that they do. Foreclosures should only bother the unforeclosed if they reduce the value of their homes. Do they? Empirical investigation suggests that the impact of foreclosures on unforeclosed housing values is quite small. It’s vacant homes that (sometimes) drive down the value of neighboring inhabited homes. But if foreclosures are quickly followed by sales to new owners, that problem does not arise. And even if it takes a while for the empty houses to sell, the impact on neighborhood housing value is temporary. That is, as long as you’re not trying to sell when all the for-sale signs are littering the neighborhood, you’ll be OK. Hence, the problem here is excess housing stock — empty houses that can’t find buyers — not foreclosures per se.
Will Obama’s plan reduce the excess housing stock? It’s hard to see how. Foreclosures have been most heavily concentrated in places where housing supply is elastic and prices remain well above construction costs. As long as that is the case, new construction will go on — and has gone on — even in the teeth of the ongoing house price collapse.
But maybe Brooks isn’t really worried about foreclosures. Maybe he’s worried about the decline in housing prices and the related collapse of securities built on existing mortgages. Maybe he’s arguing that propping-up — or at the very least, stabilizing — housing prices is the only way to rescue the trillions of dollars worth of assets tied to the housing market and, thus, to rescue the economy as a whole. If so, then good luck. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser makes a very strong argument that nothing the feds can do will keep housing prices at the inflated levels reached over the last decade. And even were such a thing possible, Glaeser argues it would be economically counterproductive:
Artificially boosting prices will distort construction decisions and redistribute wealth from buyers to sellers. Moreover, most schemes seem unlikely to significantly raise prices, especially in the elastic areas that have seen the largest reductions in prices. Against these uncertain benefits, the costs of many of the schemes seem quite large. Using hundreds of billions of dollars to buy or refinance mortgages represents a large transfer from taxpayers to current homeowners… Moreover, a large-scale intervention that makes the government a vast lender is likely to create permanent institutions that impose large future costs on taxpayers. Recent events at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac certainly suggest the difficulties that result when government-sponsored enterprises play mortgage lender to the nation.
Nor is Glaeser sympathetic with the political rush to save those threatened with foreclosure:
As foreclosure becomes more difficult, the value of mortgages declines, which reduces the value of banks assets. Direct aid to distressed homeowners may be less problematic, but it isn’t clear that the government can or should be trying to keep people in homes they can’t afford at any reasonable interest rate. In most cases, a small amount of aid to help in moving would be a more sensible, and cost effective, response to foreclosures. We do need action to fix our banking system, but those actions should be targeted towards the banking system itself, not towards the housing market.
While public intellectuals like Brooks are — for the moment anyway — inclined to lecture the Rick Santellis of this world about the necessity of housing bailouts for the greater good, there is far less substance to that lecture than one might think.
Oil Price Collapse — Bad News?
In the Washington Post today, staff writer Steven Mufson gets space on the front page to tell us about how the oil price collapse is playing out for oil producers, rival energy generators, and, ultimately, for consumers. Much of what follows is obvious — prices are declining because the economic collapse is hammering demand — but other aspects of the narrative offered by Mufson are on shakier ground.
Ed Morse — managing director and chief economist of LCM Research and a favorite “go-to” guy for print reporters — says, “The last five years saw the rebirth of the use of oil as a critical instrument of foreign policy by key resource countries, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela in particular. With oil and natural gas prices having collapsed, the power of their weapons has been waning rapidly…” Really? When, exactly, have oil-producing states used oil as a weapon in foreign policy over the course of the 2004-2008 price spiral? Have there been embargoes I’ve missed? Strategic production cutbacks tied to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank? Or substantive threats about the same that have been used as an effective lever in international relations? Not that I know of.
The only example I am aware of that Morse might cite to back up his claim is Russia’s ongoing dispute with Ukraine over natural gas prices. But gas producers have leverage in markets that oil producers don’t have, given the much higher transaction costs associated with changing buyer-seller relationships.
In short, Morse’s first claim — that oil producers have been using oil as an effective foreign policy weapon during the boom — is utterly without foundation. His second claim conflates natural gas with oil markets in a manner that muddies the issue. Belief in the “oil weapon” is like belief in UFOs; lots of people claim to have seen such things — and some continue to fear such things — but every attempt at verifying existence has come up empty. The reality is that embargoes can’t deny oil to consuming states given the fungible nature of the international oil market and severe production cutbacks will do far more harm to producers than consumers — which is why we never see those sustained production cutbacks play out.
Next, Mufson implies that energy secretary Steven Chu made some sort of gaffe when he told reporters on Tuesday that OPEC was “not in my domain.” Now, it may be correct that, politically speaking, OPEC is in his “domain,” but the reality is that American pressure on OPEC never has and probably never will have an effect on decisions made by the cartel. OPEC’s aim, after all, is to maximize revenue. Can the U.S. talk OPEC into decisions that will cost OPEC money? Chu’s right to suggest that no mere U.S. energy secretary is capable of such a thing and probably shouldn’t waste much time laboring for such an unlikely end. Bully for Chu — for a few moments at least, he had the courage to say what almost no energy secretary before him has ever dared to say.
Masters of the Universe – On the Dole
In one of the most “you’ve got to be kidding me!” stories that I’ve come across in a while, The New York Times reports that New York City wants to spend $45 million to retrain laid-off Wall Street financiers. This is so incredibly offensive that I don’t know where to begin. But I’ll give it a try nonetheless.
First, just because they are laid-off does not mean that they are poor. Won’t a lot of this taxmoney be going to, well, rich people who don’t really need it? Second, even if they now find themselves with nothing, why should the taxpayers come to the rescue? If they didn’t manage to sock away anything for a rainy day, then tough. Third, exactly what is New York going to retrain these masters of the universe to do? This ought to be well worth watching. Fourth, if they’re smart enough and savvy enough to be the master of the universe, they are smart enough and savvy enough to get back on their own two feet without the hard earned cash pinched from some cabbie somewhere.
It’s as if The New York Times has become The Onion.
Obama’s ‘Bold’ Action on Climate Change
I was invited to comment yesterday over at the New York Times on President Obama’s memorandum to the EPA to reconsider its earlier denial of a waiver requested by the state of California; a waiver that would allow that state to impose its own fuel efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and light trucks so as to reduce that state’s greenhouse gas emissions. The simple point I wanted to make at the Times is that allowing this waiver to go through would largely allow that state to dictate fuel efficiency standards for the nation as a whole. I argued that this is probably a bad thing — state action that imposes significant policy changes on the nation as a whole ought to be enjoined and those decisions ought to be left to Congress.
For those of you interested — and who have a strong stomach — read the comments on the board that follows. You might think that there is nothing particularly radical or even ideological in the argument I made. Apparently, you would be wrong.
This morning, I had a chance to reprise that discussion as a guest on the Diane Rehm Show. With me in the studio was David Shepardson, the Washington bureau chief of the Detroit News and Phyllis Cuttino, the director of the Pew Environment Group’s U.S. Global Warming Campaign. You can listen to the show online if you like, but in case you don’t have the time, here are the highlights:
Both Mr. Shepardson and Ms. Cuttino were nearly breathless about the bold, historic step allegedly taken by President Obama this week. Yet is seems to me that telling the EPA to rethink a decision made some months ago — with no stipulation that it actually reverse course — is something short of a political earthquake. “Bold action” would be legislative proposal to increase federal fuel efficiency standards, impose a federal carbon tax, institute an ambitious cap & trade program, etc. I’m not saying I support that sort of “bold” action, but please — let’s keep things in perspective.
Ms. Cuttino argued at every turn that energy efficiency equals emissions reductions. But it does not. Energy intensity in the United States declined by 34% from 1980 through 2000, but energy consumption increased by 26% over that same period. More ambitious gains in energy efficiency promise no better. For instance, energy intensity in China declined by 70% over that same period while energy consumption increased by 80%.
The only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to increase the marginal price of fossil fuels OR to strictly ration their availability. Everything else is a dodge. Reducing the marginal cost of energy or energy-related services — which is exactly what energy efficiency standards do — will not, in aggregate, reduce energy consumption.
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