Ignoring The Obvious: Energy Policy

The front page story in our paper today was Heating Worries Grow In The US by David Sharp of the Associated Press. Our link is to a different paper. David’s profile is the Associated Press correspondent in the land of the lobster and lists his first professional interests as business and finance so there is no excuse for his post. You should read David’s article in its entirety to see what it misses.

David starts out by noting that US families are dreading the heating season because costs are up and supplies are tight. Absolutely. His second paragraph is:

The Department of Energy [DOE] is projecting sharp price increases for home heating compared with last winter and some worry whether heating assistance programs will be able to make up the difference for struggling families. The situation is even bleaker in Europe, with Russia’s continued curtailment of natural gas pushing prices upward and causing painful shortages.

So, yes, Russia is causing problems for Europe. Why, pray tell, are heat oil and natural gas supplies short in the US and especially in Maine, the home of the lobster? David doesn’t have a single word on the cause of the Maine shortage. Perhaps it is the Jones Act as New England governors suggest:

The New England governors said in the letter that the DOE should explore suspending the Jones Act, a law requiring goods moved between U.S. ports to be carried by U.S. staffed and flagged ships that are built domestically, for part or all of the upcoming winter.

The Jones Act makes it difficult to transport energy (LNG or oil) from one part of the US to another. Puerto Rico and New England bear the brunt of this gift to a few ship owners. Or the lack of natural gas pipelines to New England:

However, because of a lack of natural gas pipelines, New England has difficulty getting sufficient supplies of natural gas from nearby areas, such as the Marcellus Shale formation, especially during the winter months. 

The behavior of New York (check a map as New York makes New England an island from the rest of the US) in stopping pipelines and banning fracking might even lead David to a discussion of the challenges of federalism.

Or perhaps it is the war on fossil fuels being waged by our president, The Frontrunner? Instead of trying to fix any of the regulation problems, the government is going to give money to the people for the hardships the government has caused. The government’s behavior might not disappoint you but David and the AP’s omission of the regulation problems should.

Great News On Regulation

The Supreme’s decision to return to a constitutional republic on abortion has been getting an extraordinary amount of play. It is great that a majority of the Supremes have decided that they won’t make laws anymore but we don’t see it changing the abortion outcomes much. Most abortions happen early in the pregnancy and so we don’t expect much change in abortion statistics. Some, from NRO, do:

Now that the Dobbs decision has come down, we must ask the question: What does final victory look like in a post-Roe country? It means an America in which abortion is not merely illegal — it’s unthinkable. 

We think that our republic will look like a little more extreme version of Europe after the states do their legislative work. A few extreme states will keep Roe but most of them will be like Europe in the zero to twenty week range with only a few zeros.

Much more important is the recent decision to stop the executive branch from creating administrative law that has little or nothing to do with what Congress passed. The decision in EPA v. West Virginia came about because the 44th president tried to make carbon dioxide a pollutant (it is not):

This time, it was the Environmental Protection Agency and its Obama-era Clean Power Plan rule, which sought to require existing coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants to reduce carbon emissions by producing less electricity or converting to green-energy sources — as the Court described its aim, to “compel the transfer of power generating capacity from existing sources to wind and solar.” This is one last loss for Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” strategy to use the executive branch to write laws that Obama could not get through Congress after the 2010 and 2014 elections.

The left and the Democrats that represent them are not happy about this. The Democrats are in power so they might want to reconsider. The party in power gets blamed for bad outcomes and this will reduce them. The second quarter is over so it is too late to save the Democrats from the possibility of an official recession in the first two quarters of 2022. But it might reduce the probability of brown-outs this summer and it could be a big help in 2024.

Most importantly for the country it might lead to the sensible Climate Change policy: a modest carbon tax. The decision by the Supremes means that the Democrats favored solution of command and control is unavailable to them. They don’t love higher taxes quite as much as controlling people and companies but the lack of alternatives might convince them of compromising on a carbon tax. The Supremes might have even reinvigorated Congress. The Supremes made the right decision on limiting the executive branch and it is good from the country. This is the 2022 decision folks will remember later in the century.