Archive for the ‘Energy and Environment’ Category
Federal Energy Failures
In the Washington Post, Steven Mufson does a nice job describing how Solyndra is just one of many energy subsidy failures of recent decades.
I covered some of the same topics as Mufson–including the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation–in this study at Downsizing Government. However, I presented the politics of these two projects a bit differently than Mufson. He sort of suggests that the Reagan administration was gunning to kill the Clinch River project, and that only the Carter administration was to blame for Synthetic Fuels.
Regarding Clinch River, President Carter should be credited with trying hard to kill it, but Congress blocked him. The Reagan administration initially supported the project, but that changed as the bad news mounted over time. I noted: “The combination of bad economics, environmental problems, and cost overruns gave the upper hand to project opponents in Congress, and funding was cut off by a fairly narrow vote in the Senate.”
Regarding Synthetic Fuels, the Reagan administration was once again initially supportive, and it only later changed course due to falling oil prices and numerous scandals in the program. When it became clear that the political winds were changing, I noted that ”there was a mad dash to hand out subsidies before Congress shut the project down.”
That sounds familiar doesn’t it?
Increasing the Energy Independence Ante
Three weeks ago, Cato released my policy analysis, “The Gulf Oil Spill: Lessons for Public Policy”. I argued that governmental intervention in the energy market was ill-advised and documented the depressingly numerous efforts to do more of just that by those who should have known better. On October 31, a working paper that went far further than any I had criticized appeared on the Internet. That paper — written by Robert Ames, Anthony Corridore, Edward Hirs, and Paul MacAvoy, who curiously label themselves the Yale Graduates Energy Study Group — argues for a Presidential proclamation ordering a moratorium on all oil imports save those from Canada. The withdrawal from global oil markets would be phased in over a decade.
As one might expect, there are many problems with their argument.
First and foremost, their case depends upon far greater certainty than is justified on the danger of foreign-supply disruptions, the effects of an embargo on domestic consumption, and the timely emergence of various domestic alternatives to foreign crude, particularly coal-to-liquid technology and biofuels. This ignores horrendous prior experience (something the authors tacitly recognize at the end of their paper by listing the bad energy initiatives of the past).
Their bottom line, however, is that the supply response will be so great that it will generate producers’ profits that far exceed the losses to consumers. The calculation, however, is Orwellian in its premises and is an analytically invalid measure.
Standard international-trade theory indicates that trade restrictions almost always harm the country that imposes them. Trade, nationally and internationally, arises because it is cheaper to swap other goods to get, say, petroleum, than to produce petroleum at home. The Yale Graduates’ calculation covers only the lesser part of the effect – the gains in the import-replacing industry. The larger cost of losses in export industries is ignored.
The Yale Graduates, moreover, effectively assume away the result possible in theory, but not in practice, of an astute level of import control that produces a net gain from lowering import prices without, as the Yale Graduates propose, severely reducing import volume.
In a country already burdened with enormous costs of ill-advised government policies, the last thing we need is such another governmental plunge into a fantasy world. The resulting waste would make Obamacare seem a bargain.
A second, related technical concern is that their calculation of embargo costs departs from standard practice by including the direct cost to oil consumers. Such costs are generally excluded from such calculations because, if import disruption were as probable as the authors assert, people would hedge against them. If they hedge, the cost will be zero.
The hypothetical indirect costs from alleged inflationary and unemployment effects are the usual concerns regarding foreign-supply disruptions. The standard method is to translate these costs into an estimate of the appropriate offsetting level of defensive import restriction. However, while the vast relevant literature is inconclusive about the magnitude of the impacts, it has never before produced figures that imply total elimination of imports. Regardless, Chantale LaCasse and André Plourde pointed out in 1992 that as long as the United States is engaged in any international trade, it will be affected by any oil shock. There is simply no way to wall-off the United States from major economic events abroad.
Objections also arise at several more fundamental levels.
First, the effort would be a horrendous policy initiative. Decades have been spent since 1933 trying to restore international economic integration to its 1914 level. So drastic a step as embargoing oil imports would set a very bad example.
Second, the exclusion of Mexico would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement and, almost certainly, U.S. obligations to the World Trade Organization. Examination of present and prospective patterns of oil imports indicate that the total ban would hurt clear friends as well as actual or possible enemies.
Third, even if the Presidential power to impose oil-import moratoriums (last exercised by President Eisenhower) still exists, its exercise is even more inadvisable that it was in the Eisenhower case. Critics of President Eisenhower correctly argued that the national-defense rationale for keeping foreign oil out of the United States was a fig leaf designed to disguise the real aim of the policy – to protect the independent oil producers who were the prime beneficiary of state production controls. The proposed phased-in embargo would restore the nightmare of quota allocation that messed up the initial Eisenhower program and its implementation by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Fourth, a presidential moratorium would be another unwise assumption of executive power. No president can be trusted correctly to implement such draconian import restrictions or, for that matter, any similar interventions into industry. To make matters worse, no President could be in office for the whole ten-year phase-in period.
It’s hard to believe that serious people could propose such a thing. Exposure to modern economics has greatly reduced errors as gross as this, but obviously not completely.
Note: The cited paper has a peculiar history. A precursor was Robert M. Ames, Anthony Corridore, and Paul W. MacAvoy, “National Defense, Oil Imports, and Bio-Energy Technology,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 16 no. 1 (Winter 2004) 28-50. The latest version was posted on the Social Science Research Network, but in four different browsers, the link refused to access the paper. A Google search yielded access to a substantially identical article (with the author order reversed) presented in 2010 to the United States Association of Energy Economists.
GOP Hypocrisy on Energy Subsidies?
When the Solyndra scandal broke in September, I wrote that “Republicans should be careful when casting stones given their past and present support for energy subsidies.” The left has been ripping congressional Republicans for making political hay of the Solyndra affair after having lobbied the Department of Energy to bestow their constituents with similar taxpayer handouts.
ThinkProgress released a report that documents letters sent by 62 Republican members of Congress to Energy officials groveling for subsidies. Are these Republicans hypocrites? I’d say that it depends. I think the members who justified their request on the basis of “job creation” while criticizing the Obama administration for justifying its stimulus packages on the same grounds belong in the “yes” column. Also belonging in the “yes” column are those subsidy-seeking members who have chastised the administration for engaging in “crony capitalism” and “picking winners and losers.” On the other hand, I don’t think the sole act of criticizing the Solyndra deal while begging Energy for money necessarily makes one a hypocrite.
According to ThinkProgress, “Republicans are on a war path to defund all clean energy programs – despite the fact that these Republicans previously were proponents of the program when it helped clean energy companies in their districts.” Even if it were true that Republicans now want to “defund all clean energy programs” (I wish), I wouldn’t have a problem with policymakers suddenly finding religion on the issue. As far as I can tell, all of the letters that ThinkProgress lists were sent pre-Solyndra, which means that the “sinners” now have a chance to repent.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) recently did this when he called for the abolition of the Economic Development Administration while acknowledging that he wrongly supported the program in the past. Prominent Republicans cited in the report (e.g., Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), and Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH)) now have an opportunity to admit that they were wrong and atone for their mistake by working to eliminate the programs they sought to benefit from.
My expectations for this happening are admittedly very low. Instead, I expect most – if not all – of the Republicans in question to respond with a combination of silence and excuse-making. The chief excuse will be that the money was already appropriated so they might as well try to secure a piece of the pie for their taxpaying constituents. That excuse might fly with some folks on the right, but I think it’s absolute hogwash: you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.
See this Cato essay for more on why energy subsidies should be abolished.
Big Sky, Big Buses, and Big Bill Niskanen
I first met Bill Niskanen at a conference in Big Sky, Montana soon after he had left the Reagan administration. At the time I was an environmentalist with free-market leanings rather than (as is the case for many of my Cato colleagues) a free marketeer who cared about the environment. Mainly because of James Watt, environmentalists weren’t too happy with the Reagan administration, and all I knew about Bill was that he had chaired Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. I must have been intimidated: in my memory he was about 6′-4″ tall, and I was surprised later to find he was only a little taller than my 5′-7″.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Bill’s 1971 book, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, would prove to be a major influence on my 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service. Bill was the first to suggest that government agencies work mainly to maximize their own budgets rather than serve some social good, and the budget maximization hypothesis was the only explanation I could find that fit all of the Forest Service’s behaviors I had observed since the early 1970s.
Years later, when I renewed my acquaintance with Bill, I was surprised to learn he had grown up in Bend, Oregon, a few miles from where I live. The last time I saw Bill, he graciously agreed to chair a policy forum on transportation issues, which I knew interested him because his father (also named William) owned Pacific Trailways and had won a major anti-monopoly lawsuit against Greyhound. Coincidentally, earlier this week I attended the annual meeting of the California Bus Association, many of whose members remembered Bill and asked me to say “hello” for them. Sadly, I won’t get a chance.
Bill’s lifelong habit of putting principle before self-interest is an inspiration for everyone at Cato and in the free-market movement in general. I am proud to have known him.
Solyndra: Peeling Back the Layers
As I noted previously, the story of the taxpayers’ failed $535 million subsidy to the Solyndra company just keeps building as reporters keep digging. When the Democrats on the House and Energy Commerce Committee released selected emails from the Obama administration, I asked one reporter:
If OMB and Obama’s California campaign co-chair, the former California state treasurer, were trying to put the brakes on the Solyndra enthusiasm, who had his foot on the gas?
Could the answer have been merely Steven J. Spinner, “a senior Energy Department adviser … a major fundraiser for President Obama and a Silicon Valley investor tasked with helping the government invest in clean-technology companies [who] had an ethical conflict: His wife worked for Wilson Sonsini, a California law firm that represented Solyndra, the solar-panel maker, in its applications for the government loan”? Spinner is now a senior fellow at the Obama-adjunct Center for American Progress, where as recently as July he was writing, “Even the most controversial loan guarantee recipient—Solyndra, a solar manufacturer—is seeing an operational turnaround” in an article pushing for continued funding of the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program. But he’s not the sole source of the enthusiasm for “green energy” and stimulus spending, which obviously went to the top of the administration.
Some have tried to dismiss the Solyndra story. Private investors make plenty of mistakes, too, they point out. Companies fail, sometimes through no fault of their own. But this story has all the hallmarks of government decision making: officials spending other people’s money with little incentive to spend it prudently, political pressure to make decisions without proper vetting, the substitution of political judgment for the judgments of millions of investors, the enthusiastic embrace of fads like “green energy,” political officials ignoring warnings from civil servants, crony capitalism, close connections between politicians and the companies that benefit from government allocation of capital, the appearance — at least — of favors for political supporters, and the kind of promiscuous spending that has delivered us $14 trillion in national debt. It may end up being a case study in political economy.
Here’s an updated rundown of how the first rough draft of Solyndra history is playing out before our eyes:
Louisiana Man Wins $1.7 Million From EPA For Malicious Prosecution
The legal might of the U.S. government is usually enough to roll right over someone like Opelousas, La. plant manager Hubert Vidrine Jr. But last week the underdog had his day: a federal court awarded Vidrine $1.7 million for having been maliciously prosecuted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Our friends at the Washington Legal Foundation, who helped represent Vidrine, give details:
The just-resolved case started in 1996 when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered its SWAT-like special operations team (equipped with M-16 rifles and police dogs) to raid the Canal Refinery, Mr. Vidrine’s workplace. The raid led to a criminal investigation against Mr. Vidrine for allegedly unlawful storage and disposal of hazardous wastes under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
When it discovered that evidence of the alleged offense was lacking, the feds refused to back off and in fact redoubled their zeal. In a scathing 142-page ruling, Judge Rebecca Doherty wrote that federal prosecutor Keith Phillips “set out with intent and reckless and callous disregard for anyone’s rights other than his own, and reckless disregard for the processes and power which had been bestowed on him, to effectively destroy another man’s life.”
A Greenwire dispatch published in the New York Times is at pains to present the Vidrine case (quoting a former enforcement official) an “isolated situation” arising from the actions of a “rogue” agent. As a local paper reported, “Phillips was accused of targeting Vidrine because of his outspokenness and choosing an investigation in Louisiana to be close to a woman with whom he was having a sexual affair.” The second of these motives, at least, presumably doesn’t figure very often in decisions to pursue federal criminal charges.
Cato readers have reason to be less than surprised when federal enforcers abuse their powers, especially at an agency as convinced of its own righteousness as the EPA. Nine years ago, Cato published James V. DeLong’s “Out of Bounds, Out of Control: Regulatory Enforcement at the EPA.” In 2009 congressional testimony, Cato’s Tim Lynch discussed troubling cases like that of Alaska railroad employee Edward Hanousek (“prosecuted under the Clean Water Act even though he was off duty and at home when the accident occurred”).
Yesterday, incidentally, brought another setback in court for the EPA: a federal judge slapped it down for flagrantly overstepping its legal charter by usurping the Army Corps of Engineers’s statutory role as part of its efforts to restrict coal mining in Appalachia. How many times do the agency and its enforcers have to overstep their authority before those incidents cease to be just ”isolated situation[s]“?
Penn & Teller Tell a Lie
Cato Mencken Fellows Penn Jillette and Teller launch a new hour-long show, “Penn & Teller Tell a Lie,” on the Discovery Channel this Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time. Discovery says:
Penn & Teller bring their unique vision of the world in a new interactive series with a twist. In each episode, Penn & Teller make up to seven outrageous claims. While most of the wildly unbelievable stories are absolutely, positively true – one of them is a BIG FAT LIE. It will be up to viewers to spot the fake and VOTE LIVE online or with the new GUESS THE LIE app.
They’ll put lots of scientific claims and myths through rigorous testing, continuing their longstanding interest in science, truth, and skepticism.
If you have a DVR, note that Showtime is rebroadcasting an episode of their former series, this one a skeptical look at the environmental movement, at the exact same time: 10:30 p.m. Wednesday.
And if you can’t wait till Wednesday, listen to Cato’s podcast with Penn Jillette recorded a few weeks ago.
The First Rough Draft of the Solyndra Story
Just reading the headlines of the Solyndra stories in major newspapers the past month tells a story that just keeps getting more discouraging:
Obama-backed green firm shuts down
The Washington Post, September 1, 2011
Solar firm to cease operations; Solyndra had received a $535-million loan guarantee. It plans to seek Chapter 11.
Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2011
A Third Solar Company Files for Bankruptcy
The New York Times, September 7, 2011
FBI raids offices of solar-panel firm
The Washington Post, September 9, 2011
E-mails cite rush on loan to solar firm
The Washington Post, September 14, 2011
Treasury to probe loan to Solyndra; The Federal Financing Bank’s role in the failed firm’s borrowing will be the focus.
Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2011
White House official: Funding Solyndra further was risky
The Washington Post, September 16, 2011
Amid Solyndra probe, Energy Dept. moving billions in loans
The Washington Post, September 17, 2011
SOLAR FIRM’S OBAMA LINKS PROBED; A fundraiser’s role in a loan program that aided Solyndra stokes concern about the company’s influence.
Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2011
Questions Raised Over Letting Another Lender Help a Failing Solar Company
The New York Times, September 17, 2011
Justice Dept. urged to probe Solyndra
The Washington Post, September 20, 2011
Solyndra officials to invoke Fifth before House panel
The Washington Post, September 21, 2011
Solyndra’s ex-employees tell of high spending, factory woes
The Washington Post, September 22, 2011
In Rush To Assist A Solar Company, U.S. Missed Signs
The New York Times, September 23, 2011
Government OKs new green loans; Two execs of bankrupt solar firm Solyndra plead the 5th before a congressional panel.
Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2011
A solar pariah had Republican parents, too
The Washington Post, September 27, 2011
Where Solyndra said yes, others demurred
The Washington Post, September 27, 2011
Obama aides voiced doubts about loans like Solyndra’s; A top concern was that the vetting process wasn’t rigorous enough.
Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2011
Energy Dept. knew Solyndra had violated its loan terms
The Washington Post, September 29, 2011
U.S. Backs New Loans For Projects On Energy
The New York Times, September 29, 2011
Energy chief cleared Solyndra loan breaks
The Washington Post, September 30, 2011
I found these headlines on Nexis, but of course they can be found on the newspapers’ websites. I linked to two of the stories last week.
Some have tried to dismiss the Solyndra story. Private investors make plenty of mistakes, too. Companies fail, sometimes through no fault of their own. But this story has all the hallmarks of government decision making: officials spending other people’s money with little incentive to spend it prudently, political pressure to make decisions without proper vetting, the substitution of political judgment for the judgments of millions of investors, the enthusiastic embrace of fads like “green energy,” political officials ignoring warnings from civil servants, crony capitalism, close connections between politicians and the companies that benefit from government allocation of capital, the appearance — at least — of favors for political supporters, and the kind of promiscuous spending that has delivered us $14 trillion in national debt. It may end up being a case study in political economy.
The Solyndra Story Keeps Unfolding
Is the taxpayers’ lost $535 million in the green-energy company Solyndra just an unfortunate business failure, or is there something more scandalous involved? You should read every word of this front-page New York Times article. Sure, it says that “no evidence has emerged that political favoritism played a role in what administration officials assert were merit-based decisions.” But the story is full of smoking guns.
Here’s the opening:
President Obama’s visit to the Solyndra solar panel factory in California last year was choreographed down to the last detail—the 20-by-30-foot American flags, the corporate banners hung just so, the special lighting, even coffee and doughnuts for the Secret Service detail.
“It’s here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future,” the president declared in May 2010 to the assembled workers and executives. The start-up business had received a $535 million federal loan guarantee, offered in part to reassert American dominance in solar technology while generating thousands of jobs.
But behind the pomp and pageantry, Solyndra was rotting inside, hemorrhaging cash so quickly that within weeks of Mr. Obama’s visit, the company canceled plans to offer shares to the public. Barely a year later, Solyndra has become one of the administration’s most costly fumbles after the company declared bankruptcy, laid off 1,100 workers and was raided by F.B.I. agents seeking evidence of possible fraud.
Solyndra’s two top officers are to appear Friday before a House investigative committee where, their lawyers say, they will assert their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Zoning Laws Are Strangling Silicon Valley
Many of the best jobs for computer programmers are concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, where dozens of innovative software companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Cisco, Adobe—are located. This concentration of innovative, rapidly-growing firms shows up in income statistics. For example, the average wage in the San Jose metropolitan area, around $80,000, is among the nation’s highest.
Yet strangely, the Bay Area as a whole has been growing slowly. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of the Bay Area grew by 12.6 percent, slower than the 13.2 percent growth rate of the nation as a whole. Between 2000 and 2010, the Bay Area grew by just 5.4 percent, barely half the 9.7 percent growth rate of the nation as a whole. Compare that to the Phoenix metropolitan area. Despite dramatically lower wages (the average is less than $50,000) it attracted enough people to grow by a whopping 45 percent in the 1990s, and by 29 percent in the last decade.
A major factor is a severe shortage of housing in the Bay Area. Lots of people would like to live there, but the supply of homes hasn’t kept up. As a result, the median home in the Bay Area cost about $600,000 in 2009. This means that even though Silicon Valley firms offer some of the nation’s highest wages, many families can still increase their standard of living by moving to cities like Phoenix, where the median home costs about a third as much.
This pattern has been with us for long enough that most of us just take it for granted. Everyone knows that large cities are outrageously expensive, and that families often have to move to less glamorous cities to find homes they can afford. But in his new book The Gated City, Ryan Avent argues that this complacency is misguided. Living in the heart of a large city will never be as cheap, per square foot, as living in an outer-ring suburb. But the enormous discrepancy in housing costs between Silicon Valley and the Sun Belt is mostly a result of government regulations, not the inevitably higher costs of urban life.
In the 19th Century, the most innovative cities tended to also be the fastest growing. New York, Chicago, and Detroit all grew by an order of magnitude in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as key American industries grew in them. Skyscrapers sprang up in these cities’ downtowns. In New York and Chicago especially, developers built dense, walkable neighborhoods to accommodate the surging demand for housing. And this, in turn, helped keep supply in balance with demand and avoided large price increases.
This isn’t happening in Silicon Valley. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the tallest skyscraper in San Jose, the self-styled capital of Silicon Valley, is a pathetic 22 stories tall. Silicon Valley continues to be dominated by low-density, suburban patterns of development, even as housing prices have skyrocketed.
Why is this happening? In a nutshell, it’s because high-density development is illegal. The city of San Jose has 350 pages of regulations that place an effective ceiling on building density. The regulations include minimum lot sizes, minimum building setbacks, maximum building heights, minimum parking requirements, and so on. Of course, developers can apply for exceptions to these rules, but when they do so, city officials are besieged by what Avent calls NIMBY’s (“Not In My Back Yard”), local activists who strenuously oppose having more people live or work in their neighborhoods.
Avent argues that this isn’t just an aesthetic or lifestyle dispute between those who like the suburban lifestyle and those who prefer to live in cities. By strangling the growth of America’s densest and most productive cities, restrictive zoning laws actually make the nation poorer. When an engineer leaves his $80,000 job in Mountain View for a $60,000 job in Scottsdale, he may wind up with a larger house and more disposable income. But the economy as a whole becomes less productive. In a free market, developers would be allowed to supply more housing in Mountain View so that engineer could enjoy a higher salary and an affordable home. And the phenomenon isn’t limited to the Bay Area. Large, coastal cities like New York and Boston also have high wages but anemic population growth. Meanwhile, people flock to cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Charlotte with lower wages but cheaper housing. Deregulation would not only allow more people to enjoy life in America’s most dynamic cities, but it would have a real impact on the nation’s economic growth.
The Gated City is a Kindle Single. It’s just $2, and short enough that you’ll be able to finish it in an afternoon.
Solyndra: Another Energy Boondoggle
The details surrounding the $535 million government loan to Solyndra – the now-bankrupt solar energy company that had been the green apple of the president’s eye – are still emerging. It remains to be seen whether or not the Obama administration broke any laws when it pushed the loan out the door despite obvious problems with the company’s finances.
At the very least, the administration is guilty of wasting taxpayer money. In that regard, it’s no different than all the other administrations that have tried to tinker with energy markets. When the dust settles, Solyndra will take its place alongside other infamous federal energy boondoggles, including the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, and the Superconducting Super Collider. (All of these and more are discussed in a Cato essay on federal energy subsidies.)
Congressional Republicans are salivating over the prospects of a scandal involving a key initiative of the administration. But Republicans should be careful when casting stones given their past and present support for energy subsidies. (Note to investigative reporters: Republican [and Democratic] governors like to hand out subsidies to businesses, which often backfire on taxpayers. I’d know.)
As the political circus over the Solyndra loan unfolds, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the more important question is whether taxpayers should be forced to subsidize energy companies to begin with. The Cato essay argues that they shouldn’t:
The private sector is entirely capable of performing research into coal, nuclear, solar, and alternative energy sources for itself. Businesses will fund new technologies when there is a reasonable chance of commercial success, as they do in every other private industry. Federal subsidies may even be actively damaging to our energy future by steering markets in the wrong direction, away from the best long-term energy solutions…
Policymakers often make grandiose promises, such as proposing to make America ‘energy independent’ or to convert the nation to a ‘green economy.’ Those visions don’t make any sense, but even if they did history shows that the Department of Energy would be incapable of putting them into place with any degree of competence. Federal energy schemes are often poorly managed and generate huge cost overruns, or they aim at objectives that make little economic sense[.]
Overregulation, Swing States and D.C. Cynicism
Today’s Wall Street Journal carries a news report on how the Obama administration, after more than two years of pursuing damn-the-costs government control over the private sector, is finally developing more internal debate about whether and when zealous regulations are worth the cost. In particular, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs chief Cass Sunstein, known as skeptical about some costly rules, has now acquired an important sometime ally in White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who played a role in getting EPA to table some very expensive new air-quality standards the other day.
All well and good, but I was stopped short by a paragraph that shouldn’t pass without comment:
The same day, Mr. Daley met with industry groups, who gave the White House a map showing counties that would be out of compliance with the Clean Air Act if the stricter standards were put in place. The map showed that the rule would affect areas in the politically important 2012 election states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio.
Even by Washington standards, isn’t it appallingly cynical to evaluate environmental rules that could (critics have argued) cripple wide sectors of the economy according to whether the worst damage falls on politically vital states like Florida and Ohio, or just ho-hum non-swing states like Oklahoma, North Dakota and Tennessee? True, the article doesn’t say who was cynical enough to draw the connection here — the business groups giving the presentation? The White House listeners? Some third party whose viewpoint this is all being filtered through? But whoever’s being the cynic here, one of the costs is to feed the alienation of citizens of Texas in particular, whose officials and businesses have been complaining for more than a year of being singled out for hostile attention by the Obama EPA. For everyone’s good, I hope someone in the White House at this moment is writing a sharp letter disclaiming any special intent to help Pennsylvania, Virginia et al. And I hope after drafting that letter they will be cleared to send it off for publication in the Journal, not just keep it in the desk to show outraged delegations of Texans.
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