National Review and the American Energy Alliance presented The Energy Subsidy Experiment: A Debate on Energy, June 7, 2013, in Washington D.C. Moderated by Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review, the panel included Bob Dinneen of the Renewable Fuels Association, Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal, Tom Pyle of the American Energy Alliance, and Michael Zehr of HBW Resources. Watch the six-part replay here:

Friday’s jobs numbers from the Labor Department show that President Obama needs to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Even with 175,000 jobs created in May, there are 2.4 million fewer jobs in America than at the start of the recession in December 2007.

Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, to bring oil from Canada to our refineries near the Gulf of Mexico, would create jobs, both for constructing the pipeline and for refining the oil. But President Obama has delayed the pipeline’s approval, citing safety concerns.

Pipelines have been used to transport natural gas and oil, including from Canada to the United States, for three-quarters of a century. Almost 500,000 miles of interstate pipelines crisscross America, carrying crude oil, petroleum products, and natural gas, and over 2 million miles of natural-gas distribution pipeline send natural gas to businesses and consumers.

This extensive infrastructure network is heavily regulated by the U.S. Department of Transportation, which monitors the very issues central to the Keystone controversy: safety and reliability.

My review of accident statistics provided by the Department of Transportation shows that, in addition to enjoying a substantial cost advantage, transporting these substances by pipeline results in fewer spillage incidents and personal injuries than transporting them by road or rail. Americans are more likely to get struck by lightning than to be killed in a pipeline accident. The full paper can be found here.

The question of how to transport oil and natural gas safely and reliably is broader than Keystone XL. Petroleum production in North America is now at nearly 18 million barrels a day, and could climb to 27 million barrels a day by 2020, attracting manufacturing from abroad and creating yet more jobs. Natural-gas production in Canada and the United States could rise by a third over the same period, climbing to 22 billion cubic feet per day.

U.S. oil and natural-gas production is outpacing the transportation capacity of our inadequate national pipeline infrastructure. The Keystone XL pipeline is only one of many pipelines that will need to be constructed in the years ahead. Much of America’s refining capacity is located in the Gulf states, but large and expanding reserves of petroleum are being discovered in the north-central part of America and in Canada. Bringing oil to refineries, and then to end users, requires pipelines.

If this oil and natural gas can easily travel to where it is needed, all America will be able to benefit from lower energy prices and thus from increased economic activity and employment. New environmental regulations are closing coal-fired power plants, increasing the demand for natural gas. Large fleets of buses and trucks are switching to natural gas, and General Motors and Chrysler are making dual-fuel pickup trucks.

Approximately 70 percent of crude oil and petroleum products are shipped by pipeline on a ton-mile basis. Tanker and barge traffic accounts for 23 percent of oil shipments. Trucking accounts for 4 percent of shipments, and rail for the remaining 3 percent. Essentially all natural gas, except liquefied gas, is shipped by pipeline to end users.

If personal injuries and environmental damage caused by accidents in the transportation of oil and natural gas were proportionate to the volume of shipments, one would expect the vast majority of incidents to occur on pipelines. But the opposite is true — the majority of incidents occur on road and rail, as shown by Transportation Department data, even though more road and rail incidents go unreported.

Road transport had the highest rate of incidents, with 19.95 per billion ton-miles. This was followed by rail, with 2.08 per billion ton-miles. Natural-gas pipelines came next, with 0.89 per billion ton-miles. Oil pipelines were the safest, with 0.58 incidents per billion ton-miles.

Natural-gas pipelines had the lowest average fatality rate for operator personnel and the general public between 2005 and 2009, with a rate of one person killed per year. This was followed by oil pipelines and rail, each with an average of 2.4 people killed per year. Road had the highest fatality rate, with an average of 10.2 people killed per year. This is not because many members of the public are killed in accidents involving oil trucks. Only 1.4 members of the public, on average, were killed annually, but an average of 8.8 operators died per year.

Not only are fatalities and other injuries relatively low, but the majority of those that do occur have been associated with pipelines that are part of intrastate natural-gas-distribution systems. The U.S. network of pipelines for natural-gas distribution spans over 2 million miles, and the federal government does not regulate state pipelines (local distribution and production-gathering lines), except for gathering lines that are located on federal lands. Local distribution networks, which account for the vast majority of pipeline miles and where the vast majority of accidents occur, are regulated by states and municipalities. The federal government would regulate the Keystone XL pipeline.

The evidence is clear: Transporting oil and natural gas by pipeline is safe. Furthermore, pipeline transportation is safer than transportation by road, rail, or barge, as measured by incidents, injuries, and fatalities — even though more road and rail incidents go unreported.

As America continues to ramp up production of oil and natural gas, our pipeline infrastructure becomes more and more important. We need better pipelines to get oil from North Dakota to the refineries in the Gulf, and natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania (and New York, should the Empire State allow production to move forward) and the Utica Shale in Ohio to the rest of the country.

In order for these resources to get where they are needed, America needs more pipelines — the safest way to move fuel.

— Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She is the author of Regulating to Disaster: How Green Jobs Policies Are Damaging America’s Economy (Encounter Books, 2012).

ADVERTISEMENT

Phil Cafaro is a leading radical anti-humanist. A professor of philosophy at Colorado State University and president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, he has published numerous articles and a book calling for shackling humanity with all sorts of chains, ranging from mandatory recycling, to limits on meat consumption, airplane travel, and the size of houses, to stiff carbon taxes, immigration restriction, and population control. He also urges the abandonment of Judaeo-Christian ethics and human rights. According to Cafaro, the world population needs to be reduced to 2 billion and the U.S. population to 100 million. “The last thing the world needs is more Americans,” he says.

On May 13, I got a chance to debate him. The debate was occasioned by a guest commentary that Cafaro penned in the February 11 Denver Post, in which he advanced the argument that immigration needs to be sharply cut, because otherwise people from Third World nations might come to the United States and become prosperous, and thereby add to global warming. “And make no mistake,” warned the philosopher. “Immigrants are not coming to the United States to remain poor. Those hundreds of millions of new citizens will want to live as well and consume energy at the same rates as other Americans. . . . What climate change mitigation measures . . . could possibly equal the increased greenhouse gas emissions we would lock in by adding 145 million more new citizens to our population?”

I rebutted this on NRO on February 21: “This is truly remarkable. Conservative immigration skeptics have voiced the concern that immigrants might not assimilate and achieve success, and even common xenophobes have never objected to would-be immigrants attaining prosperity elsewhere. But according to Cafaro’s liberal argument, the wretched of the Earth must be kept poor wherever they reside, because otherwise they would ruin the weather for the rest of us. Following this logic, the United States should adopt the role of the world’s oppressor, enforcing the continuation of poverty around the globe. But why stop there? We have millions of poor people right here in America who hope to rise into the middle class. Surely we must stop them from doing so.”

I sent the piece to Cafaro and challenged him to public debate. He accepted, and John Andrews, the director of Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute, agreed to host the event, setting it for April 15. It was snowed out (by one of the several blizzards this spring, which was the second coldest since 1860), but Cafaro agreed to reschedule, and on May 13 the encounter finally occurred.

It was a remarkable event. If you want to see it, the video is now available. You can watch it online, or download it from Dropbox.  But for those who would rather read a condensed, partially paraphrased, and frankly partisan first-person account, here is what happened.

Andrews, who served as the moderator, introduced the contestants and stated the debate proposition, which was that to help stop global warming, the United States should seek to sharply reduce carbon emissions, cut immigration, and reduce population growth. Cafaro, arguing for the affirmative, was given 17 minutes to present his case, and then there was equal time for me, representing the negative. Following this, we were each given 7 minutes for rebuttal, after which the meeting was opened up to 40 minutes of questions posed by members of the audience.

In his opening presentation, Cafaro soft-pedaled his actual beliefs, pointing (disingenuously, as later became evident) to concern for the 22 million Americans unemployed or underemployed as a reason to stop immigration, an action that, he further said, would allow the American population to be stabilized in the 360 million range by the end of the century. If this is not done, he said, then the U.S. population will rise to 600 million by 2100 and strongly drive anthropogenic global warming. This, which he claimed had already entailed an increase of the Earth’s temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius per decade for the past century (a total of 15 degrees C!), would raise it another 3 to 6 degrees C over the next 50 years, with devastating results. Thus, said Cafaro, immigration restriction combined with other measures to limit the U.S. population is “the right policy for stewardship, and the right policy for future generations.”

I then took the floor, focusing most of my presentation on the chart below.

Figure 1: Average global GDP per capita vs. global carbon use, 1800–2010 (2010 dollars)

“This graph,” I said, “shows the history of humanity’s great escape from poverty over the past 200 years. From the world depicted in the novels of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, with an average per capita income of $180 per year and people starving to death in the streets of London and Paris, the capitals of the world’s leading nations, to the world of today, with an average global GDP per capita of nearly $9,000. As you can see, it has been driven directly by carbon use. . . . What we are looking at here is not only a grand story of a world of billions of people escaping from poverty, but millions of individual stories of people escaping from places where they were doomed to poverty to places where they had the opportunity to rise. It’s a story of millions of people coming to America.

“So here,” I said, pointing to the lower-left-hand part of the graph, which begins in 1800, “they have names like Smith and Andrews, and they are coming from impoverished circumstances in England and Scotland. And here [pointing to 1850] they have names like O’Brien and O’Donnell, and they are coming from Ireland. And here [pointing to 1875] come Hanson and Johansen. And here [pointing to 1910] come Kowalski, and Kaplan, and Petrakis, and Cafaro. And here [pointing to the mid 20th century] they have names like Rice, and King, and Robinson, and they are coming from the land of Jim Crow to the land of opportunity. And here [pointing to 2000] they have names like Chang, and Gupta, and Gonzalez, and they come, seeking and finding opportunity. 

“Now this is so obviously good, who could oppose it? Cafaro does. He says, repeatedly, in his writings that ‘the last thing the world needs is more Americans.’ Well, I say that the first thing the world needs is more Americans. And here is why: Because we need to ask ourselves who did this [pointing to the line on the graph rising from $180 per year in 1800 to nearly $9,000 per year in 2010]? Who is responsible for this miracle? Well, for the first part [pointing to the region of the graph from 1800 to 1875], the answer is, the British. There are others who play a supporting role, including Americans and continental Europeans, but in the main, this is a British show, and it’s a great achievement, raising the world from $180 per year to $500 per year. But after that [pointing to the graph from 1875 to 2010], it’s the U.S.A. It’s America, inventing oil drilling, and light bulbs, and recorded sound, and centrally generated electric power, and telephones, and airplanes, and motion pictures, and mass-produced automobiles, and radio, and television, and nuclear power, and modern agriculture, and computers, and transistors, and micro-electronics, and all the rest. We are 4 percent of the world’s population, but for the past century we’ve been responsible for half the world’s inventions. That’s why the world needs more Americans.

“But has this been accomplished at the expense of a climatic catastrophe? Well, I’m 61, and my memories go back to Sputnik [pointing to the late 1950s], when the average global GDP per capita was $2,200. During the span of my living memory, we’ve quadrupled the global per capita income. What has happened to the weather? Well, for those of you who weren’t around then, let me tell you. When I was a boy, the weather was pretty much the same as the weather is now.”

That line got me a big knowing laugh from the audience. I then went on to display my second graph, provided below, which shows how, contrary to Cafaro’s Malthusian ideology, since 1500, as the world’s population has increased, GDP per capita has risen even faster.

Figure 2: Growth of living standards with population, 1500–2000 (2010 dollars)

I then pointed out, as a matter of particular interest, the part of the graph since 1968, when Cafaro’s mentor, Paul Ehrlich, published his bestselling book The Population Bomb, in which he predicted a collapse of living standards worldwide, including in America, should the global population double as anticipated by the year 2000. (Incidentally, Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, wrote the introduction to Cafaro’s book, Life on the Brink, published in 2012.) “As you can see,” I said, “the population did double, albeit by 2010, but instead of collapsing, as predicted by Ehrlich, the global GDP per capita tripled. Well, anyone has the right to be wrong about the future. But Ehrlich was also wrong about the past.” Here I pointed to the thin purple line with which I extrapolated the predictions given by Ehrlich’s theory backward in time from 1968. “Ehrlich was born in 1931, when the population of the world was 40 percent lower than it was in 1968. So if Ehrlich’s theory that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers was correct, then the world should have been much richer in the 1930s than it was in 1968, and Ehrlich would have been around to see it. But of course the world of the 1930s was much poorer than the world of the late 1960s, let alone the world of today. It is this willingness to ignore readily available data, and continually make predictions on the basis of a theory that has been shown to be completely counterfactual, that defines Ehrlich and his fellow Malthusians as cranks.”

At this point Andrews informed me that I had only one minute left. So I went straight to my conclusions. “The bottom line is this. Ideas have consequences. If the idea is accepted that humans are not creators but destroyers, then every nation becomes the enemy of every other nation, and every race the enemy of every other race. In 1941 Adolf Hitler said, ‘The laws of existence require uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live.’ Genocide is supposedly necessary because the Earth only has so much carrying capacity. That is the worldview that Cafaro and his co-thinkers are promoting. And if it is accepted, then there will be world war. Because if the Chinese come to believe it, the existence of the United States is unacceptable. We are using up too many of the world’s resources, and so forth. And should America’s strategic thinkers accept it, then for them the rise of China becomes unacceptable, because when the children of Chinese peasants graduate from college, they’ll buy cars, and start using the oil that we need, etc. But if the truth is understood — that humans are creators, not destroyers — then every nation is potentially the friend of every nation. The truth is that China’s ability to rise from poverty has depended entirely upon inventions made in America and elsewhere in the West, so the existence of America has been very good for China. And should the children of Chinese peasants become scientists and engineers, they will start making inventions that will contribute to human progress, and thereby benefit us. So that’s the choice: a world of war of all against all, or a world where all men can be brothers. The more people there are, the more free people there are, and the more of the freest people there are, the better off we all are.”

My time was up, but Andrews felt that I hadn’t directly addressed global warming very much. He asked Cafaro if I could have two more minutes to directly address that topic, and Cafaro generously agreed. So I did, briefly making the following points: Empirically the current rate of global warming is unclear, as we have just had the second-coldest spring since 1860. But if it were occurring, that would be something to celebrate, as global warming lengthens the growing season and increases net rainfall. Furthermore, increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which we have indeed done, accelerates plant growth, and we have both photos taken from orbit and reproducible lab experiments to prove it. So the bottom line is that we are making the world a more fertile planet. “The Chinese have a saying, ‘Where there is a will to condemn, evidence is never lacking.’ The anti-humanists want to put humanity in chains, so they seek to represent any human action as criminal. But we should be proud to have made the Earth more fertile.”

Cafaro then gave his rebuttal, making the point that in his view global warming must be bad, because we are accustomed to the current climate. He said that it was not correct to say that he is anti-people. He just does not consider the advancement of humanity as consisting of acquiring ever more wealth. Continuing in this vein, he proceeded to quote the Bible, reminding us to lay not up for ourselves treasures on Earth, but put them in Heaven, as where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. “We must choose between the pursuit of Mammon and another path that is better for our society,” he said. “I am frankly anti-growth,” he continued. “Our politics are built around the pursuit of growth. That might be okay for a poor country, but not for the U.S.A. I’d like to see more spiritual growth and less material growth.”

Then it was again my turn. I thanked Cafaro for admitting plainly that he was anti-growth, as this underscores the lack of sincerity of his alleged concern for the unemployed. Cafaro, I said, wants to stop immigration in order to stop economic growth, which is the only hope for the unemployed. I then addressed the broader issue of what Cafaro is actually up to, in combining xenophobia with collectivism. “Hayek examines this same phenomenon in The Road to Serfdom,” I pointed out, “where he says that Nazism is actually the ultimate form of socialism. How can that be, Hayek asks rhetorically, since the Nazis are racists while the socialists are internationalists? He then answers that, yes, the social democrats may prefer internationalism, but what Hitler understands is that if you really want to mobilize the passion required to impose the full collectivist agenda, you have to invoke the tribal instinct. Thus the combination of xenophobia with collectivism, the most lethal political combination there is. No one should be fooled by this. If you combine nationalism with socialism you don’t get conservatism, or liberalism. You get National Socialism.”

In response to Cafaro’s citing of the Bible, I offered two quotes of my own — Leviticus 19:33–34 and a longer passage from Mathew, 25:34–46 — which make it very clear where the Judaeo-Christian tradition stands relative to both xenophobia and Cafaro’s supposedly spiritual endorsement of state policies designed to enforce poverty. In contrast, I drew the attention of the audience to the philosophical writings of Cafaro and his fellow ideologues, who deride in their journals any form of human-centered ethics as representing “anthropocentrism,” a supposedly more primitive and narrow outlook than theirs, which places nature first and human needs last.

The floor was then opened to questions. The first questioner asked Cafaro how he thought Social Security could be financially sustained under conditions of negative population growth. Cafaro saw no problem, so long as the decrease was gradual.  I disagreed, pointing to the impending bankruptcy of Europe following from its ongoing population implosion. “It’s been said that the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money to spend,” I commented. “Another is when you run out of other people’s children to support you.”

Andrews asked Cafaro if he did indeed want the U.S. population to decline. Cafaro said yes, but avoided saying how much. I then quoted one of Cafaro’s own articles in his Life on the Brink anthology, in which he favorably cited Negative Population Growth ideologue David Pimentel’s estimate that the proper U.S. population size was between 40 and 100 million. My daughter Rachel, who was in the audience, then asked Cafaro how he expected to deal with recurrent natural climatic problems like glaciation. Cafaro replied that that was for the long term — the problem now was to stop warming. I commented that the broader problem being raised was how can we cope with massive natural threats, including glaciation and asteroidal impacts. Clearly, the only way is by increasing our technological and industrial powers over nature, not holding them back. Andrews asked Cafaro to comment on his opposition to “anthropocentrism.” Cafaro responded that he was indeed opposed to ethics that placed value only on what was of use to humans and that, accordingly, he was also concerned with animal rights.

A questioner asked me what I thought was sustainable “on a planet with limited resources and land size.” I answered that the concept of sustainability within stasis was itself wrong, and that no fixed set of resources will ever last. The need therefore is for continued invention. “The idea that a society can pull in its horns and live within its means is false. Static societies have always failed. The society that has succeeded is one based on progress.” Andrews then asked me how many people, in that case, can we have on Earth. I replied that we are on the verge of achieving true access to space, and whether that occurs in 10 years, 20, 50, or 100, in an historical blink of an eye, the relevant arena of human activity will expand far beyond the confines of the Earth, just as our current global reach extends far beyond the limits of our species’ original natural habitat in the Kenyan Rift Valley.

Andrews asked Cafaro if he believed in the precautionary principle. Cafaro replied that while he would not ban all innovations, we have had an awful lot of progress in the past 100 years, and so a certain amount of precaution makes sense before we progress further. So let’s slow down a bit, he said. I intervened to point out that the average world income today is nearly $9,000, and while that is a great accomplishment relevant to past ages, we still have a long way to go. Poverty remains the No. 1 problem in the world today, I said. Poverty kills millions, through starvation, disease, exposure, brutality, ignorance. To say we’ve made it, so now progress can stop and the rest of the world remain in poverty, is not a moral position.

A Colorado Christian University professor commented that his best students were immigrants, and if we seek to exclude such bright, hard-working people, we will weaken the national fiber. Cafaro answered that nothing he said should be taken to imply that he was against immigrants, to which I responded by pointing out that he did want to exclude them. He said yes, but we have all the bright, hard-working people we need already here within our borders. I then spoke, agreeing with the CCU professor that excluding such people would reduce the future of this country, and therefore the world, “because it is America that holds up the sky.”

A questioner then confronted Cafaro with data showing that for the past 16 years there has been no global warming. Cafaro said he hadn’t seen those data. Another questioner asked Cafaro how he accounted for the 1,700 scientists who have signed a statement saying that the warmist campaign is a hoax. Cafaro answered that it was impossible to imagine how the thousands of scientists who are involved in the development of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports could be induced to cooperate in a massive scientific fraud. I replied, “Not if you understand how science is funded.”  I then went on to discuss how in the 1920s, pseudoscientific reports based on IQ tests given in English were used to argue for immigration restriction based on the non-existent threat that Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were posing to the nation’s hereditary intelligence.

A questioner then asked Cafaro what he meant when he said he supported “noncoercive” population-control measures. Cafaro responded by saying he supported the use of contraceptives. Andrews asked Cafaro where he stood on the Chinese one-child policy. I pointed out that it is endorsed in Cafaro’s book. Cafaro replied that the book is an anthology, merely edited by him, and that one of his contributing authors (David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!) had actually made that endorsement. Andrews then pressed Cafaro to say where he stood, and Cafaro admitted that he endorsed the one-child policy too, saying that if China hadn’t had it, there would have been 200 million more Chinese, which would have been a disaster. I then spoke, quoting Cafaro as recommending that limits on childbearing be enforced by fines, which is certainly a form of coercion. I also quoted one of his own articles in his anthology, in which he says that the United States should use denial of foreign aid as a means of forcing Third World countries to impose top-down population-reduction programs, and I proceeded to discuss exactly how many such brutal, racist programs have been implemented under USAID auspices to date. Cafaro replied that that was unfortunate, and so to prevent our ever getting to that point, the United States should start implementing domestic population-control programs now.

The time limit for the event having been reached, Andrews drew the meeting to a close, and the audience departed, perhaps somewhat enlightened.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy, www.pioneerenergy.com, and the author of Energy Victory. His latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was published last year by Encounter Books.

‘Admit it . . . you haven’t read it all either.”

Thus said a New York Times op-ed (by Bono, of all people) about the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, just a couple of months after that law’s passage in 2010. The line reflected a common sentiment toward the 2,600-page law, and things haven’t improved since. Both supporters and opponents of Dodd-Frank will concede that, as with Obamacare, members of Congress passed the law before they — or the public — knew or understood what was in it.

But give Obamacare this much: So far, in digging through its thousands of pages, no one has found any hidden provisions that significantly affect foreign policy, international trade, or energy policy. The same can’t be said for the so-called financial-reform bill.

“Hidden somewhere in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill,” noted the op-ed, “there is a hugely significant ‘transparency’ amendment. . . . Now energy companies traded on American exchanges will have to reveal every payment they make to government officials.”

Hold on. A provision targeting energy companies — in a banking bill?

In the almost three years since Dodd-Frank was rammed through Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — significant players if not the largest culprits in the mortgage crisis — are bigger than ever. The law did not lay a hand on them.

And many on both left and right say Dodd-Frank didn’t make a start on curbing the power of too-big-to-fail banks. In fact, the law’s designation of “systemically important financial institutions” through its Financial Stability Oversight Council enshrines too-big-to-fail by telling creditors which financial firms the government will spare from a normal bankruptcy.

But rest assured that Dodd-Frank is working — at great cost — to force energy companies to tell shareholders each and every payment they make to foreign governments, and all public companies to say whether they have ever used tin or tungsten from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As explained by Mercatus Center scholars Hester Peirce and James Broughel in their book Dodd-Frank: What It Does and Why It’s Flawed, the law’s “miscellaneous provisions” in Title XV offer “a clear example of how a statute invoked as the answer to the financial crisis is, in reality, an odd conglomeration of responses to issues, many of which had nothing to do with the financial crisis.”

The specific provision championed by Bono ended up as Dodd-Frank’s Section 1504. With the stated aim of combating the use of “dirty money” by U.S. energy companies, it requires firms developing oil, gas, or minerals to disclose payments they make to foreign governments to further their development activities. Section 1502, championed by some of Bono’s fellow celebrities, including Ashley Judd and Ben Affleck, requires all types of firms to disclose their products’ use of five “conflict minerals” — including gold, tin, and tungsten — that can be sourced to war-torn regions of the Congo.

Fighting corruption and violence in the Congo is a laudable goal, but it is a bad idea to pursue foreign-policy objectives through a financial bill. There are a number of reasons for this, the most important being that the government entity charged with enforcing these provisions is neither the State Department nor the Defense Department, but rather the Securities and Exchange Commission — which no one would call an agency well-schooled in the nuances of foreign policy.

Under Dodd-Frank’s Title XV provisions, the SEC requires companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to disclose these things in the same annual reports in which they disclose financial information to investors. This new mission creep imposed on the SEC could impair its efforts to protect U.S. investors from financial fraud, as Peirce and Broughel warn: “Title XV not only fails to address any issues that arose during the crisis, but it also distracts the SEC from undertaking reforms designed to prevent future crises.”

For Bono and other activists, it’s all worth it to be making a stand against — in the immortal words of musical satirist Tom Lehrer — “poverty, war, and injustice, unlike the rest of you squares.” Bono, who has in the past made thoughtful arguments on the role of trade and development in combating poverty, becomes almost a caricature of the rock-star crusader when he talks about this Dodd-Frank provision, spouting the tired and untrue platitude that “corruption [is] more deadly than the deadliest of diseases.” He concludes that this kind of forced disclosure “is the kind of daylight that makes the cockroaches scurry. . . . And the cost to us is zero, nada.”

In fact, even under the SEC’s constrained cost-benefit analyses, the costs of these rules are far from nada. The SEC has estimated that each provision would costs companies more than $1 billion in initial costs, with annual costs after that in the hundreds of millions. Moreover, U.S. energy companies exploring for resources abroad are now required to disclose to the general public information that fits into the category of trade secrets, by revealing how much they paid for each individual project. This means that the state-owned oil companies in some of the most corrupt regimes — which aren’t subject to Dodd-Frank because they don’t list on U.S. exchanges — now have access to this valuable info, giving them a competitive edge over their U.S. private-sector rivals. As American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard points out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “the 16 biggest oil companies in the world do not fall under SEC jurisdiction.”

And if the costs of these provisions force U.S. companies to pull out of developing countries, the results will not be pretty for the ordinary citizens of those countries — as has already been shown to a large extent with the “conflict minerals” provision.

Because it is nearly impossible to source many minerals used in manufacturing to their countries of origin — gold has been called “the world’s most recycled material” — many manufacturers have told their suppliers to avoid all regions of the Congo and all nearby nations. Bono and his fellow celebrity activists would do well to read another Times op-ed, in which freelance journalist David Aronson describes how Dodd-Frank’s backdoor tariffs are re-impoverishing Africa. Among the effects Aronson describes: “Mining towns are virtually cut off from the outside world because the planes that once provisioned them no longer land. . . . Villagers who relied on their mining income to buy food when harvests failed are beginning to go hungry.”

Dodd-Frank has already entrenched too-big-to-fail and worsened Third World poverty. That’s some achievement for a law that’s not yet three years old.

— John Berlau is senior fellow for finance and access to capital at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Rush Limbaugh hasn’t made a lot of green friends over the years with his “environmental wacko” tirades, but, given what’s going on these days, perhaps his rhetoric has been too mild.

Exhibit No. 1 is the sleek and sexy Tesla Model S. If you want the one with the lowest chance of stranding you on I-95, it will set you back over $100,000. You’ll be refunded $7,500 from the federal government, several thousand more (in most states) from state taxpayers, plus various other credits that governments bestow upon ostentatious and cheap virtue, like putting a special plug in your garage. Somehow, Tesla is still losing money.

You might have read otherwise. The company’s stock price doubled — to about $110 a share — after it reported a profit last month. Along the way, its genius founder, Elon Musk, hit upon the clever notion of paying off hundreds of million dollars in federal loans by issuing a jillion more shares of TSLA stock.

Supply and demand usually dictates that when the number of shares in a company is dramatically increased, the price goes down, but this is not the case with TSLA. By announcing a phony profit, TSLA made its stock kite to the point that issuing even more of it generated enough dough to retire its massive federal debt.

By “phony” I mean this: Conservatively speaking, Tesla lost about $11,000 for every car that rolled out the door last quarter. But they covered that by selling $68 million in “credits” to their competitors.

These competitors had chosen not to enter the obviously limited market for cars with an average real-world range of around 200 miles. We know the market is limited thanks to the paltry sales (averaging around 2,000 per year) of the Honda Civic GX, a natural-gas-powered version with about that range. But the State of California punishes car companies that won’t go along with this craziness, making them buy “credits” to not produce what no sane company would, from the only one that does: Tesla.

Honda (“The Power of Dreams”) thinks it’s a perilous business model to depend upon evanescent global-warming shakedowns and subsidies. They are reading the recent scientific literature in which climate scientists are clumsily trying to thread the needle between backing off their forecasts of the end of the world and maintaining a shred of credibility.

Exhibit No. 2 is the increasing clear-cutting of the jungle-like dense vegetation of the southeastern U.S. to fight global warming. Say what?

Remember all that caterwauling that cutting down the world’s forests is a bad idea because it results in increasing carbon dioxide emissions as the felled trees are burned? As Mikhail Gorbachev says, “that’s old thinking.” The EU has now decided that forests are “renewable,” and that their wood is a renewable fuel, disregarding their previous concerns about carbon emissions. But they won’t cut their own forests, because they have laws against clear-cutting, or mowing down the entire woods.

So we cut down ours. The 100-year-old trees of Northampton County, N.C., that are being bulldozed, pelletized, and shipped to Europe to be combusted in (previously) coal-fired power plants indeed are renewed — after 101 years. In the meantime, global concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, but the Euros meet their 2020 target.

The green pashas of the EU have finally come to the realization that their previous favorite “renewable” technologies — solar energy and windmills — aren’t going to get them even close to their silly commitment to reduce their emissions of dreaded carbon dioxide by 20 percent below 1990 levels a mere 6.5 years from today.

Maybe that’s because solar is guaranteed not to work whenever there’s insufficient solar radiation — about 50 percent of the time, or “night” — and Europe’s high latitude means there is little insolation except during the summer. And maybe it’s because the “load factor” for wind is even worse, running around 15 percent. There is no way anyone would invest in such insanity if it weren’t paid for with other people’s money.

The Euros could reduce emissions the way the good old U.S.A. is doing, by hydraulically fracturing deep shale for natural gas. That increases supply to the point that it displaces coal for electrical generation, which results in cheaper power and half the carbon dioxide emissions. They could, but the same nutsos who think that reducing their emissions will have a detectable effect on global temperature also think shale gas is yucky.

Why won’t they go our way? Because the green world is stark, raving mad.

Destroying the forest for the good of the environment is insane, right? So is shaking down auto companies that produce profits by selling cars rather than indulgences, and so is giving folks who buy $100,000 cars an average of $10,000 of taxpayer largesse.

Rush was right: Wackos.

— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

At current consumption rates, the United States has more than a century’s worth of natural gas beneath its soil, and new drilling methods are making it much easier to extract. The shale-gas boom has created jobs, generated economic growth, and produced consistently low prices in a historically volatile market.

In fact, the current price of natural gas may be too low to sustain the current rate of development. Some producers are flaring gas and passing up opportunities to drill new wells until they can get a better price. As a result, many in the industry are looking to expand to foreign markets where prices are much higher.

Exporting natural gas is no easy task. An exporter must first liquefy it at extremely low temperatures, then send the liquefied natural gas (LNG) overseas from a purpose-built export terminal and deliver it to a specialized import terminal for storage or distribution via pipeline. It’s a huge investment of time and money — yet sometimes the hardest step of all is getting the government’s permission.

Of course applicants have to undergo the normal environmental review and permitting process conducted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as would anyone building such huge facilities. But Section 3 of the Natural Gas Act of 1938 also gives the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy a say in the decision — and not on health or safety grounds, but based on whether DOE thinks it’s good for the economy.

DOE automatically authorizes a permit for exports if the importing nation has a free-trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S. Unfortunately, many of the countries that want our natural gas and will pay high prices do not have such an agreement. If there’s no FTA, the Energy Department must publish a notice of the application in the Federal Register. Then there’s an extended comment period, and eventually DOE will issue a ruling that decrees whether the desired facility is in the public interest.

The initial motivation behind this process was to keep natural gas, in times of scarcity, from being sold abroad when it was needed at home. Whatever the wisdom of that policy, today there is no possibility of a shortage developing, and with all the jobs and money flowing from natural-gas wells, it might seem obvious that selling more gas at higher prices will benefit the economy. Yet the DOE still thinks long and hard before approving permits (a second one was just granted, leaving 19 under consideration), under pressure from hard-core environmentalists who oppose all fossil fuels and manufacturers who benefit from cheap gas.

The Obama administration has been saying most of the right things about these permits. Now it’s time to walk the walk by allowing the market, instead of politics, to determine how much natural gas the U.S. will export. If the administration continues to drag its feet on approving the other 19 licenses, Congress should step in.

The benefits of exporting LNG are clear — not least to the Department of Energy itself, which recently released its second study on the macroeconomic effects of LNG exports. The analysis, produced by National Economic Research Associates, projects annual increases in export revenue as high as $30 billion. By 2020, the report concluded, LNG exports could increase gross domestic product by up to $47 billion: “Across the scenarios, U.S. economic welfare consistently increases as the volume of natural gas exports increase. This includes scenarios in which there are unlimited exports.”

Sure sounds like shipping out more LNG would be in the public’s interest, especially for a president who wants to double American export growth. But the longer the administration waits to approve licenses, the greater the likelihood of squandering this growth opportunity. Australia alone has eight export terminals under construction. If a slow permitting process needlessly delays America’s terminals, the economics could change, as the arrival of exports from other countries lowers prices in areas where U.S. companies wish to export.

President Obama has spoken favorably about natural gas and the possibility of America’s being an energy exporter. So, too, has newly confirmed energy secretary Ernest Moniz. In fact, Moniz chaired a 2011 MIT study that recommended: “The U.S. should sustain North American energy market integration and support development of a global ‘liquid’ natural gas market with diversity of supply. A corollary is that the U.S. should not erect barriers to natural gas imports or exports.”

Ironically, the federal agency that Moniz heads up now poses the greatest unnecessary barrier to more natural-gas exports. Some advocate a go-slow policy, worried that an unrestricted natural-gas boom will lead to a bust. But it’s unlikely that all the companies that have applied to build export facilities will actually build them, because changes in prices would make it no longer profitable. In any case, those decisions should be made by the private sector, not the federal government.

If the administration isn’t going to walk the walk by approving natural-gas-export licenses to non-FTA countries, Congress should work to lift those restrictions. In a free economy, goods and services go to their highest valued use. Natural gas is no different, and it should be treated the same as any other good the U.S. trades around the world.

— Nicolas D. Loris is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

The federal government assumed responsibility for nuclear-waste management more than 30 years ago. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 created an ostensibly simple system: Nuclear utilities would pay the U.S. Treasury a fee, collected from their customers, to cover the costs, and the government would see to it that the waste was taken care of. The act and its amendments over the years specified every detail of the disposal process. They stipulated how the waste would be disposed of, where, and who would be responsible.

Surprise! Despite the politicians’ and bureaucrats’ best efforts to centrally plan a long-term solution, the system doesn’t work. Although the government successfully collects money from the consumers of nuclear-generated electricity — nearly $30 billion since 1982 — it has collected zero nuclear waste. And as the waste — nearly 70,000 tons and counting — continues to build up at nuclear plants around the country, the government continues to dither. It literally has no plan to collect and dispose of the waste.

To address this, earlier this spring four senators released a draft of another “solution”: the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013. Unfortunately, the NWAA does nothing to fix the failed system. Instead, it accepts the notion that the feds, not waste producers themselves, should be responsible for nuclear-waste management, and it continues the policy of having waste producers pay a flat fee for these services.

In an attempt to fix this, the bill creates a new bureaucracy to handle the problem in place of the Department of Energy — but this new bureaucracy cannot solve the problem if it works under the same assumptions that have stalled the DOE for three decades. Rather than modify and perpetuate a broken system, Congress should chart a totally new waste-management strategy. Here are some steps it should consider:

1. Start by finishing a permit for a permanent waste repository.

Deep geologic storage provides a safe, long-term solution and is critical to any sustainable nuclear-waste-management plan. There is almost no political or technical disagreement over that fact. It’s time to finish the permit review for Yucca Mountain. The Obama administration has tried to terminate the project, but finishing the review isn’t optional; it’s required by law.

2. Make producers responsible.

France, Finland, Japan, and Sweden all have functioning nuclear-waste programs. The common thread among them: Waste producers are responsible for waste management. A new American system should transfer waste management into hands more capable than the government’s.

3. Allow for market-based pricing.

Prices determine the attractiveness of a product or service for suppliers and customers alike and permit rational economic decision making. They also give potential competitors the information needed to guide them in introducing new alternatives. Waste-management reform should allow waste producers to pay directly for actual services rendered and nothing more — as opposed to the present system, in which they pay a flat fee for an undefined, unrendered service. And the amount paid should be whatever emerges as the market value of the service provided.

4. Allow competition.

Though full privatization of waste-management services should be the long-term objective, a transition that begins by simply allowing competition would be extremely valuable. The government could still offer waste-management services, but any reform should allow waste producers to seek services from regulated nongovernment entities. Utilities could then determine what approach would best meet their unique waste-management needs.

These basic reforms could yield a variety of outcomes — all of them better than what the current system delivers. Perhaps it will turn out that the private sector just can’t provide some or all of the needed waste-management services better than the government can. In that case, the government would remain as the nation’s sole waste manager. More likely, though, America will find that the private sector can provide the entire spectrum of services better than the government.

Regardless, policies that introduce market forces and corporate responsibility are key to a long-term solution. But to achieve this, we need a bill with some attitude.

— Jack Spencer is the Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow in nuclear-energy policy.

“Progressive” politicians, pundits, and organizations continue to wage political warfare on affordable energy, and their team still controls the Senate and the EPA. Their worldview, however, is crumbling.

Think back to the mid-2000s, when Congress last enacted major energy bills. The period of 2005 through 2007 was a high-water mark of U.S. oil-import dependence. The expert consensus at the time held that America was fated to become ever more dependent on increasingly costly energy imports unless policymakers could tax and regulate America “beyond petroleum.”

During those same years, the Kyoto Protocol’s entry into force, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the UK government’s Stern Review (famous for warning that climate change could decrease global GDP by 5 to 20 percent annually “now and forever”), and the UN IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report set the terms of debate on global warming.

Alarm was the ideological fashion du jour. Fear of peak oil merged with fear of climatic disruption to make fuel-economy mandates, biofuel mandates, wind and solar mandates, “green jobs” programs, and even cap-and-trade seem like ideas whose time had come. A lot has happened since then.

In recent years, advances in unconventional oil and gas production have transformed North America into a major hydrocarbon-producing region. Imports as a share of U.S. petroleum consumption declined from 60 percent in 2005 to 40 percent in 2012.

By 2011, more than half those imports came from the Western hemisphere, with Canada’s share more than twice that of Saudi Arabia. Petroleum products became America’s leading export for the first time in 2011, and again topped the list in 2012.

As Mark Mills detailed earlier this week, the shale boom has already created hundreds of thousands of jobs and attracted $150 billion in foreign direct investment. If policymakers allow U.S. producers to compete in the global marketplace, the oil-and-gas industry could create millions of new jobs, generate hundreds of billions in cumulative tax revenues, and eliminate much of the U.S. trade deficit.

The potential geopolitical benefits are also considerable. U.S. hydrocarbon exports could undermine Russia’s leverage over Europe, weaken OPEC, strengthen alliances with friendly nations, and improve America’s bargaining position vis-à-vis our top creditor — China.

The narrative of inexorable depletion, dependence, and decline is obsolete. The narrative of climate doom is not faring much better.

A constant refrain of alarmist rhetoric is that climate change is “even worse” than scientists previously believed. That is hard to square with a 15-year period of no net warming — an outcome that “consensus” scientists did not predict and still struggle to explain. Whatever the causes, the observed warming rate over the past 15 years is lower than the UN IPCC’s best estimate, as NASA scientist Roy Spencer has clearly demonstrated.

A plausible explanation, based on several 2011-2012 studies summarized by Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger, is that the IPCC overestimated climate sensitivity (the amount of warming from a doubling of pre-industrial greenhouse-gas concentrations).

Otto et al. (2013), a study published last month in Nature, also indicates that the climate system is less sensitive than the IPCC’s best estimate. Lower climate sensitivity means less warming, hence less damaging climate change impacts. That’s good news.

There is much more. In 2006-2007, commentators like Al Gore, Joseph Romm, and Fred Pearce popularized scary climate-change impact scenarios, such as ice-sheet disintegration and catastrophic sea-level rise, dramatic increases in extreme weather, and climate-destabilizing releases of methane from melting permafrost. Recent studies undercut the credibility of such predictions. Here’s a short list:

King et al. (2012): The rate of Antarctic ice loss is not accelerating and translates to less than one inch of sea-level rise per century.

Faezeh et al. (2013): Greenland’s four main outlet glaciers are projected to contribute 0.7 to 1.1 inches to sea-level rise by 2200 under a mid-range warming scenario (2.8°C by 2100) and 1.1 to 1.9 inches under a high-end warming scenario (4.5°C by 2100).

Weinkle et al. (2012): There is no trend in the strength or frequency of land-falling hurricanes in the world’s five main hurricane basins during the past 50 to 70 years.

Bouwer (2011): There is no trend in hurricane-related damages since 1900 once economic-loss data are adjusted for changes in population, wealth, and the consumer-price index.

NOAA: There is no trend since 1950 in the frequency of strong (F3 to F5) U.S. tornadoes.

National Climate Data Center: There is no trend since 1900 in U.S. soil moisture as measured by the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

Hirsch and Ryberg (2011): There is no trend in U.S. flood magnitudes over the past 85 years.

Schultz (2011): Even under the most extreme climatic scenario tested, permafrost thaw in the Siberian shelf will not exceed 10 meters in depth by 2100 or 50 meters by the turn of the next millennium, whereas the bulk of methane stores are trapped roughly 200 meters below the sea floor.

Kessler et al. (2011): Microbes digested the methane released during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, indicating that any warming-induced “large-scale releases of methane from hydrate in the deep ocean are likely to be met by a similarly rapid methanotrophic response.”

Goklany (2009): Global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by 93 percent and 98 percent, respectively, since the 1920s.

Granted, climate-alarm persists. The main reason is that climate risk is easily confused with climate-change risk. Due to their sheer magnitude and terror, natural catastrophes have an almost supernatural aspect. People are innately prone to imagine that natural disasters have non-natural causes. Thus, each time disaster strikes, pundits — especially those with scientific credentials — can plausibly blame fossil fuels and declare “it’s worse than we thought.”

But the best available science does not support such claims. Far from being worse than predicted, the climate outlook is better than we have long been told. For this reason, too, policymakers should remove self-inflicted constraints on the development and export of North American energy.

— Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment.

Every American, whether Democrat or Republican, agrees that job creation and affordable energy will be crucial to our economic turnaround. Fortunately, there is a project that will create jobs, provide direct investment in our economy, and move us closer to our longstanding goal of becoming energy independent: the Keystone XL pipeline.

Keystone will deliver 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada, North Dakota, and Montana to Gulf Coast refineries. It will directly create 20,000 jobs and indirectly create tens of thousands more, at a time when more than 11 million Americans are out of work. Added reliable supply from Canada and North Dakota also will reduce the impact of oil-price spikes dictated by the OPEC cartel. And we know, based on a study by the State Department, that the project will have minimal impact on the environment.

The benefits associated with this project are widely understood: 66 percent of Americans support Keystone, according to a March Pew Research poll. And yet President Obama has refused to grant the necessary permits. So it’s up to Congress to force the issue — but the effort to do so has fallen victim to Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

Standing alongside the vast majority of Americans who support this project, House Republicans unanimously joined 19 House Democrats to support legislation that would approve the pipeline. This strong support extends to the U.S. Senate, too. On March 22, before the House had passed its authorization, 62 senators voted to express support for the Keystone XL pipeline. This filibuster-proof vote in favor of putting Americans back to work included 17 Democrats.

Despite support from a majority of Americans, a majority of the House of Representatives, and a majority of the Senate, Keystone XL is stuck – stalled by special-interest politics.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that since the majority of his colleagues support the project, Leader Reid will bring the House bill to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote. But conventional wisdom doesn’t account for the political pressure he is receiving from the White House, which has stalled on approving this project since President Obama took office in 2009. Reid knows the project would pass the Senate, forcing the president to make a decision that pits his radical-environmentalist base against job creation.

Making his priorities clear, Leader Reid has even said, “I am not going to help [the pipeline] in any way I can. The president feels that way. I do, too.” Such an important project should not rest on a senator’s political whims.

This posturing should stop. Americans believe in securing a reliable supply of the critical resource that takes our children to school and delivers products to customers. They believe we should capitalize on the opportunity to reduce the influence OPEC nations have on the price of oil. And most important, they believe in American job creation.

It’s time to act, Mr. Leader. Bring the Keystone XL pipeline to the floor for a vote.

— Kevin McCarthy is the representative of California’s 23rd district, serves as the majority whip in the House of Representatives, and is the chairman of the House Energy Action Team.

In the past half-decade, the United States has seen a spectacular hydrocarbon boom: Oil-and-gas production has risen to levels not seen since the 1990s, and is expected to continue rising, making the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer by 2017.

Our emerging emirate status has been a private phenomenon. Despite the huge swaths of land owned by the federal government, most of the increased production has happened on private land. Overall, the federal share of onshore oil production dropped from 33 percent in 2009 to 26 percent in 2012.

Why? The answer is some blend of dumb luck, the federal government’s lackadaisical land-management policies, and the Obama administration’s intransigence and countervailing priorities.

The luck part: Most of the boom in production has come from new reserves opened by hydraulic fracturing, which releases natural gas and what’s known as “tight oil” by cracking shale rock. The two most fracking-friendly areas, it turns out, are almost entirely privately held — the Bakken formation, mostly in North Dakota (4 percent federally owned), and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas (1.8 percent federally owned) — as are other fertile areas in states such as New York and Pennsylvania.

But it isn’t just a matter of increased private production; natural-gas production on federal lands has actually dropped about 8 percent since 2009. Michael Levi, an energy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggests that the two trends “match quite closely,” with private production replacing federal production. Private gas replaces public gas, rather than adding to it, for a variety of reasons: The U.S. government seriously constrains natural-gas exports, our stores are filling quickly, prices are dropping, and there is still not a massive consumer market for it. The equation will change over time, but the fundamental issues will remain.

Thus, much of the boom in private production relative to federal can be chalked up to the competitive nature of oil-and-gas development — the best tracts right now happen to be private, so the boom happens there, and federal production suffers. Further, government land has always been a less competitive product and harder to develop (in part inevitably so). Yet rather than attempting to narrow the gap, the federal government has done quite a good job of widening it.

The federal leasing and permitting process is, no surprise, tortuous and slow. It involves a herd of federal agencies, for one: The lease-making Bureau of Land Management (BLM), but also the EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forestry Service, the National Park Service, etc. And once a developer has a lease, he still needs permission under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a process that currently has a substantial backlog. Finally, a developer has to obtain a permit to drill, for which the wait time in 2011 was 307 days, up from 218 in 2006. (Needless to say, the federal government’s glacial pace of permitting is especially problematic for small developers.)

For a project on private or state-owned land, by contrast, permits appear with great alacrity: A permit to drill takes an average of ten days in North Dakota and a fortnight in Ohio. Even for federal-land projects, the needed state-level permits take an average of 30 days — incidentally, the same period of time the Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that the BLM’s process should take.

A variety of piecemeal reforms have been proposed. The Bush administration, for instance, launched a pilot program in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to reform and accelerate the BLM’s processes. The program has since languished, but the Obama administration has promised to reinvigorate it, in part responding to the increasing amount of drilling states have been permitting on non-federal lands. The program is currently used in a number of BLM field offices and has seen lower costs, faster permit times, and better compliance. Western Energy Alliance, a coalition of small energy producers across the West, has also proposed outfitting BLM offices with dedicated NEPA preparers to aid oil-and-gas producers.

But despite the benefits it can provide to businesses and workers, expanding federal leasing is a low-priority issue for lawmakers. The returns for any single district or even state are not obvious; the revenue benefits will be indirect, since the federal treasury gets the royalties when developed land turns out to be profitable. (Jason Chaffetz of Utah, which is 66 percent federally owned, deserves accolades for persevering anyway.)

In 2012, Mitt Romney’s campaign put forth a much more direct, and dramatic, suggestion: Keep the leasing federal, but push permitting to the relevant state agencies, of which there is usually just one. Permits would be granted much more quickly, in part because economic incentives would be properly aligned — the communities whose environments would be impacted and whose economies would be stimulated would be the ones to decide. (Of course, some federally owned land is of national significance, but most is not, which is why the federal government hasn’t sold it.) Such a reform is probably not politically feasible: The best developers can hope for is that this proposal will spark reform in the federal government.

Which makes the Obama administration’s attitude toward leasing and exploration especially problematic. Perhaps the most obvious indicator of its priorities came in early May, when the California branch of the BLM announced that it did not have the staff and funding to offer leases for drilling in the Monterey Shale, a rich vein for fracking. They even blamed sequestration — but in March, the same office granted permits for solar and wind projects on federal land. Environmental groups cheered the decision, heralding it as evidence that the BLM would be spending even more time on its already lengthy deliberative process.

Further, in 2010, the Obama administration added a new layer to the permitting process for some lands: “master leasing plans,” or MLPs, a further analysis of concerns about particular tracts after the BLM has already drawn up “resource-management plans” for leasing a given region.

Resource-management plans themselves take years — the process for some federal tracts in Utah took all eight years of the Bush administration — and now, as Kathleen Sgamma of Western Energy Alliance explains, “they’re saying that wasn’t good enough,” and that “now we need to do more intensive study,” including more consultation with environmental groups. Sgamma says that, in theory, these extended reviews aren’t supposed to preclude development, but activity has been halted on lands currently going through MLPs. The Obama administration introduced MLPs under the guise of BLM reform, suggesting that they would reduce the risk of environmental protests and lawsuits later in the permitting and drilling process; it’s hard to tell whether that will succeed, since no MLP has yet been completed.

Exploration of federal lands has languished too: The Bush administration, for instance, commissioned an analysis of the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, by the U.S. Geological Survey, which uncovered unfathomable amounts of oil — there could be multiple Arabian peninsulas’ worth. It’s in highly unconventional reserves of “oil shale,” essentially oil in rock form — not to be confused with conventional oil that’s extracted from shale via fracking. This means much of the oil cannot be extracted at a reasonable price unless some new technology is developed for the job. But Obama’s Department of the Interior has significantly delayed the issuance of research leases for the area.

Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that this is one of the worst aspects of the federal government’s land policies: Much federal land simply remains unexplored, and the potential benefits of discovering substantial reserves, immediately recoverable or not, are huge. He points not just to the federal government’s slow leasing and permitting numbers, but also to the amount of land offered for lease, period. A government committed to maximizing the revenues from the land no one claimed “back in the good ol’ days,” Mills suggests, could be doing vastly more to encourage exploration, leasing, and production. (He points to the fact that even tiny Ireland managed to mount huge development efforts upon discovery of natural-gas reserves.) Such initiatives require initial outlays from the government and investment in the BLM and the U.S. Geological Survey, but the potential benefits, Mills explains, make this a “no-brainer” when it comes to the revenue issue.

The Obama administration has done even worse in the moratoria it has imposed on offshore drilling, with little more than panic over the Deepwater Horizon spill to justify its caution, but that is a separate issue.

In some sense, the story of the U.S. government’s relationship with the oil-and-gas industry fits into the larger picture of our economy: Government interference and inertia have not managed to prevent the success of the private sector, but they have been a real hindrance — and there’s no sign it’s getting better.

– This article is from the June 17, 2013, issue of National Review. 

In Washington, learning comes hard. Officials may know when to back off when they’ve crossed wires with Congress, but in most cases, and in less time than you’d think, they’re back at it again.

Take the State Department’s rush three years ago to seal a civilian nuclear deal with Vietnam. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. had initialed a draft agreement in July of 2010. It featured nuclear-nonproliferation provisions far looser than what Congress wanted. When the Hill found out, it threw a fit, the White House withdrew the deal, and State promised to lead a government-wide review of U.S. nonproliferation policies.

That was 33 months ago. Last September, State completed the review and forwarded its recommendations to the White House. The president has yet to focus on them. Instead he’s gotten excited about promoting U.S. nuclear-reactor exports to — you guessed it — Vietnam.

Last month he sent a U.S. nuclear-export delegation to Hanoi. It included the White House director for nuclear-energy policy, the under secretary of commerce, the assistant secretary of energy for nuclear energy, and 18 nuclear-industry representatives. Their mission: to persuade Vietnam to buy Westinghouse reactors.

Key Hill committee staffers were caught out. Nobody from the executive branch had bothered even to tell them about the trip. They are now making inquiries to try to discover what happened.

Why should they care?

First, the administration’s heavy emphasis on promoting U.S. nuclear exports (consider the nuclear-power boosterism of his most senior nonproliferation appointee, put on obsequious display at a recent nuclear-industry confab) now seems ascendant over tightening nuclear-transfer controls.

If so, the Vietnam outing speaks to the credibility of the president’s nonproliferation policies. How can one take these policies seriously if the White House is pitching reactors to Hanoi (again) without even bothering to rule on the recommendations of its own nonproliferation-policy review? Did anyone on the U.S. delegation even raise nonproliferation conditions as a possible issue with their Vietnamese hosts? If so, what did they discuss?

It is worth noting that Congress faulted Secretary Clinton’s first nuclear-cooperative deal with Vietnam in 2010 for failing to include the conditions contained in the previous U.S. civilian nuclear agreement, which Congress had just approved — the 2009 U.S.–United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreement. Negotiated by both the Bush and the Obama administrations, it required the UAE to foreswear making nuclear fuel, either by enriching uranium or by chemically separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel — activities that can bring a state to the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons. It also obliged the UAE to accept new, highly intrusive international nuclear inspections. At the time, these restrictions were heralded by the Obama administration as constituting a new nonproliferation “gold standard” for U.S. nuclear-cooperative deals. The model, however, hardly lasted for long.

The official excuse, given on background eight months later, for why Secretary Clinton’s initialed 2010 Vietnam draft deal didn’t include these conditions was that Asian nations, unlike states in the Middle East, were unlikely to engage in military nuclear rivalries. After North Korea’s third nuclear-weapons test, China’s recent flaunting of its military nuclear modernizations, and the latest South Korean and Japanese debates about developing nuclear-weapons options of their own, this argument seems weak.

This brings us to the second reason Hill staffers are curious about the Vietnam junket: South Korea. The Obama administration has asked Congress to act in the next few weeks on a two-year extension of the existing U.S. nuclear-cooperative agreement with Seoul. The existing deal was supposed to be renegotiated so it could be extended for another 30-year period. Seoul, however, wanted Washington to allow it to make nuclear fuel from U.S. nuclear materials. This caused U.S. negotiators to balk. Publicly, U.S. officials worried that giving South Korea the go-ahead to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium would sink any prospect of getting North Korea to back off from doing so.

An additional concern, though, was more immediate and credible: Saying yes might lock down Japanese plans to finally open a large, uneconomical fuel-making plant capable of producing 1,000 to 2,000 nuclear bombs’ worth of “civilian” plutonium a year. If Japan should decide to open this plant, located in Rokkasho, it might easily give Beijing yet another reason to turn its own military preparations up an additional notch. It was for these reasons that U.S. negotiators asked South Korea to agree to a short, two-year extension to allow further negotiations to sort these matters out.

Reflecting these worries, congressional staffers from both parties added modest language to the administration’s draft U.S.–South Korea two-year nuclear-agreement-extension bill. The staffers’ amended language clarified the desirability of keeping nuclear-fuel-making at bay on the Korean peninsula and in Asia more generally. Administration officials, however, have privately made it clear that they want this language taken out.

This raises even more questions. Is the administration going to hold the line on Korean fuel-making? If so, how can it do this without doing the same with Vietnam? Or is the plan to cave in both cases? If so, how do we intend to deal with the nuclear-fuel-making aspirations of Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey?

One diplomatic answer is that we will handle these matters country by country (i.e., case by case). If Congress settles for this, though, it will have forgotten what it was trying to make the White House understand when it first complained about Secretary Clinton’s cutting a loose nuclear deal with Vietnam: That a “case by case” policy is no policy at all.

— Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, Va., and editor, with Bruno Tertrais, of Nuclear Security Crises: What Does History Teach? (forthcoming).

On May 17, the Department of Energy (DOE) approved just the second license in America to export natural gas. Nineteen more applicants still wait. Yes, private businesses, willing to spend tens of billions of private capital, are lined up for a schoolyard game of “Mother May I” to get permission to export a product that the U.S. is uniquely good at manufacturing. So good, in fact, that America is now the world’s No. 1 producer, with no end in sight. What a world.

Liquefied-natural-gas exporters are eager to capitalize on the U.S.’s ridiculously abundant supply. Consider: Since 2010, U.S. natural-gas production from the three major shale fields has risen 250 percent. In order to sell some of that abundance to eager overseas buyers, exporters must spend billions of dollars on enormous facilities to supercool and liquefy the gas so it can be carried on ships. The DOE’s decision to grant the second permit ever for that activity was met with cautious praise, especially by those hoping for more permits to dribble out.

Congressional hearings and government and private studies have parsed the economic benefits of exporting natural gas, as have innumerable articles and blogs. But this whole controversy is based on outdated laws and assumptions.

The DOE’s control over natural-gas exports — and the Department of Commerce’s over crude oil — comes not from some fundamental constitutional principle, but from legislation that dates back to 1938 and 1975. The underlying motivation then was a misconception about the imminent exhaustion of domestic oil and natural-gas resources (this outdated idea is still cherished by some — call them “clingers”).

One thought experiment cuts to the core of this issue. Substitute words like wheat, soy, microprocessors, or even software, for the words natural gas and ask whether it makes sense for bureaucrats and politicians to be empowered with decisions about where American firms can sell what they produce cheaper, better, and more productively than any other country.

Modern technology has made the U.S. the world’s fastest-growing producer of oil and natural gas. This is not, it bears noting, the result of some happy “discovery” in a heretofore unexplored corner of America. The U.S. Geological Survey identified the existence of pretty much all the hydrocarbons in America’s territories a century ago. Instead, today’s smart-drilling technology, of which hydraulic fracturing is just one feature, albeit an important one, has changed the game. Consider how the ever-cautious International Energy Agency recently put the implications: “[The] surge in North American oil production will be as transformative to the market over the next five years as was the rise of Chinese demand over the last 15” (emphasis added.

The oil-and-gas business today more closely resembles manufacturing than an extractive industry, unlike the first American hydrocarbon revolution, a century ago. But what is remarkably similar now is that we find in today’s hydrocarbon shale fields tens of thousands of entrepreneurially driven businesses of all sizes. This is not a “Big Oil” game (though they’re buying into it now), but a classic reprise of America’s “can do” era. And it is much more widely distributed this time, in dozens of states. We’ve been looking for a manufacturing- and small-business-driven economic revolution. Well, it’s here.

And this hydrocarbon-manufacturing revolution came about in the face of stiff ideological, political, and regulatory headwinds. (It’s not even possible to look for, never mind produce, oil or natural gas in at least half of American territory.) But the hydrocarbon boom has already started to take a whack out of the staggering, job-killing U.S. trade deficit. It has stimulated $150 billion in foreign direct investment in hydrocarbon fields in the past four years alone — a free foreign stimulus. And there will be a total of $5 trillion more in cumulative investment over the coming decade. The boom has already generated millions of jobs and sent billions in revenues to state and federal treasuries. All this has happened without encouragement, specific subsidy, regulatory favoritism, or stimulus largesse. Imagine what could be done if Washington decided to flip the intellectual framework from delay, oppose, and control to accelerate, encourage, and unleash.

Instead of urging the DOE to do the right thing, Congress should take up legislation to fix the core problem. To start, strip the DOE of export authority. And while we’re at it, strip the Department of Commerce of its similarly antiquated anticompetitive authority to control the export of American crude oil. Next, enact policies to unleash production and exports of hydrocarbons. This would be consistent with the president’s National Export Initiative (NEI), which professes “that exports will play a critical role in catalyzing America’s near- and long-term economic growth” and further boasts that the NEI “represents the first time the United States will have a government wide export promotion strategy with focused attention from the president and his Cabinet.”

Those who write, defend, and administer our current energy policies are suffering from what psychiatrists call cognitive dissonance, “a mental conflict that occurs when . . . confronted with challenging new information, most people seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding the new information.”

Is there a doctor in the House?

— Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of its newly released report The Case For Exports, and the co-author of the book, The Bottomless Well.

In case you hadn’t heard, California is in trouble.

What was once truly the Golden State is now panning for every spare cent — and it will need a lot of them. State auditor Elaine Howle reports that the state’s net worth is negative $127 billion, and that does not include its $300 billion unfunded pension liability. Governor Jerry Brown is glowing about an anticipated $850 million surplus in the state’s budget by the end of the next fiscal year — the product of a $6 billion tax hike, part sales tax and part surcharge on the wealthy — but even if he can reduce the state’s “wall of debt” to the current goal of $5 billion by 2016–17, the state remains deeply mired in unemployment (9 percent as of April), rampant spending, and municipal crises (USA Today highlights ten California cities in danger of going bankrupt; Stockton became the largest city in the country — population 300,000 — to file for Chapter 9 when it went bust last summer).

The state has a way to seriously curb those problems, an energy renaissance within easy reach — if Sacramento will get out of the way. But the state’s extreme environmental policies are keeping California from using its abundance of untapped shale oil and its enormous nuclear-energy capacity.

Approximately 15 billion barrels of oil are locked in the Monterey Shale, a 1,700-square-mile rock formation several thousand feet below California’s Central Valley and southern coast. That’s two-thirds of the entire country’s shale-oil reserves, equivalent to five years of U.S. petroleum imports. Moreover, a study conducted by the University of Southern California indicates a potential increase of 512,000 to 2.8 million jobs, depending on how drilling operations develop, accompanied by “nontrivial” in-migration — people moving to California. That would be a change. And if all that isn’t incentive enough for lawmakers, the study predicts new state and local tax revenues totaling anywhere between $4.5 billion and $24.6 billion.

But California has the dubious distinction of being one of the country’s most aggressively “green” states. And when it comes to economic growth, that shows.

California’s crude-oil production has been creeping downward since 1980, as the state’s green lobby has become increasingly influential. A.B. 32, also known as the Global Warming Solutions Act, was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Its three-phrase cap-and-trade program, administered by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), aims to return to 1990 greenhouse-gas-emission levels by 2020, and for those affected (currently, businesses that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year), the restrictions are costly, if not downright debilitating. The program’s second phase, which begins in 2015, will expand to include a host of other companies, among them gasoline, diesel, and natural-gas providers.

A study by Andrew Chang & Company for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association predicts that A.B. 32 will cost California residents $136 billion by 2020. The state’s annual economic output will be reduced by $153 billion, or 5.6 percent, it will have 262,000 fewer jobs than if the law had never passed, and total state and local tax revenues are likely to drop by more than $7.4 billion annually. And the study calls this the “optimistic” scenario. The pessimistic one has California families paying an extra $4,500 annually in total economic costs, and a $39 billion tax-revenue decrease by 2020.

John Kabateck, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business/California, told Cal Watchdog, a government-oversight organization, that small businesses are likely to be the hardest hit: “Consumers will have less money to buy our products, employers will be forced to purchase more affordable products outside of California, and our own energy costs will make it nearly impossible to stay in business.”

A Boston Consulting Group study, conducted for the Western States Petroleum Association, predicts that in-state gas prices could rise by as much as $2.70. With gas in many areas of the state already at $4 per gallon, the state might want to channel some of the $3.7 billion that will flow from refineries and fuel suppliers to CARB into expanding its riot police.

Cal Watchdog’s website gets the headline right: “Studies predict AB 32 will crash Calif. economy.”

But California lawmakers are ignoring these warnings and doubling down. As of May 29, legislators in Sacramento had submitted ten anti-fracking bills to slow or halt activity in the Monterey Shale, and Democratic state senator Fran Pavley is calling for a moratorium on the practice. “We don’t know enough,” she says.

The flurry of anti-fracking bills exemplifies how a blinding environmentalism has taken hold in California. And it aims to stop more than the shale-oil industry.

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, opened in 1968, provided power to 1.4 million homes and businesses in southern California before its two generators were shut down in January 2012. Southern California Edison (SCE), the utility that runs San Onofre, halted operations when premature wear from replacement steam generators resulted in a leak of radioactive steam. The generators have been offline since, but Edison is awaiting a decision from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about whether it can restart one generator at 70 percent power. The company has said that if it cannot get NRC approval soon, mounting costs (some $470 million) will force it to close the plant permanently.

And that means less energy at higher prices for the region. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that “after the shutdown of SONGS [San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station] in early 2012, the relatively inexpensive nuclear generation produced by SONGS had to be replaced with power from more expensive sources. Consequently, since April 2012 Southern California power prices have persistently exceeded Northern California prices.”

A 2010 study by the California Research Bureau concludes that nuclear-generated electricity prices are more stable than natural-gas and petroleum ones; nuclear energy is safer (in terms of accidents and deaths) than coal, oil, natural gas, or hydropower; and nuclear plants emit no carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, or nitrogen oxides, making them spectacularly “green.”

But San Onofre — like other now-defunct California nuclear plants — is suffering the slings and arrows of environmental aggression. California senator Barbara Boxer claims that Edison and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Japan-based company that built the plant’s generators, were aware of design flaws before the equipment was installed and subsequently misled regulators about the scope of the steam-generator replacement that led to the plant’s problems. She says Edison misrepresented the nature of the replacement to avoid the costly, time-consuming relicensing process. Edison argues that they did not knowingly install faulty equipment and that they followed proper NRC procedure to obtain a licensing exemption. Boxer is calling for a Justice Department probe.

Of course, Boxer’s inquest likely has less to do with proper licensing than with an entrenched distaste for nuclear energy. San Onofre has long been a source of discontent among environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, and since its shutdown it has been the Exhibit A of the supposed dangers of nuclear power. “I’ve been in the utility industry for 40 years,” wrote S. David Freeman, past head of the TVA and of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, “and I have come to realize that you have to be blind not to be an alarmist about nuclear power.”

In February California secretary of state Debra Bowen approved the “California Nuclear Initiative,” which, if passed, would shutter the state’s two remaining nuclear plants (San Onofre and Diablo Canyon, 275 miles up the coast). If supporters can collect 504,760 signatures, it will go on the 2014 ballot. Activist Ben Davis Jr., who is spearheading the measure, used the same strategy in 1989 to successfully close the Rancho Seco nuclear plant near Sacramento. If Davis’s initiative succeeds, it will be the effective end of California’s nuclear future. A 1976 state law prohibits construction of new nuclear plants in California until the state approves a means of disposing high-level nuclear waste. A bill to rescind that moratorium was voted down in 2007.

If the measure to close the two plants passes, it would be bad news for California residents, many of whom have not forgotten the rolling blackouts that struck the state (for unrelated reasons) in 2000 and 2001. Nuclear energy could be a buffer against that. “There are no technical barriers to large‐scale deployment of nuclear power in California,” concluded a 2011 study by the California Council on Science and Technology. “There are, however, legislative barriers and public acceptance barriers that have to be overcome to implement a scenario that includes a large number of new nuclear reactors.”

If Sacramento continues down its current path, those barriers will remain for a long time to come. California’s energy resources could make it possible for the Golden State to become golden once again. Its lawmakers, however, are dedicated to making sure that does not happen.

— Ian Tuttle is an intern at National Review.

President Obama chalked up impressive “wins” in his first term: stimulus bills, financial-services regulation (Dodd-Frank), and, of course, Obamacare. But he didn’t get everything he wanted. His cap-and-trade proposal was handily defeated once it was exposed as an enormous energy tax.

That setback hasn’t ended the president’s war on conventional energy sources, however. Recognizing that cap-and-trade is now a damaged brand, he is moving full speed ahead with EPA regulations to address global warming. Meanwhile, his allies in Congress have turned to pushing a carbon tax. Unfortunately, some members of the center-right coalition that defeated cap-and-trade are expressing interest in the concept.

Senators Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and Bernard Sanders (I., Vt.) have introduced the first major carbon-tax bill — not as a substitute for the EPA regulations, but as an addition to the agency’s command-and-control approach.

The carbon tax is based on the notion that carbon dioxide emissions, created by fossil-fuel combustion, contribute significantly to global warming. That theory has led the EPA to classify carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant, even though it presents no direct harm to human health. A carbon tax appeals to many economists and tax theorists as a way of pricing emissions — the idea is that producers pay a tax that offsets the damage supposedly done by their emissions.

But theories do not always produce practical, effective policy. And the problems attached to a carbon tax are legion. For starters, the science is far from settled on just how carbon-sensitive the climate is. That makes it impossible to accurately assess the social costs of carbon.

Beyond that, there is no reason to believe that adopting a carbon tax would produce any appreciable improvement in the environment. Even Mr. Obama’s former EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, admitted that a carbon-reduction program in the U.S. would not affect global carbon levels, much less temperature.

The only real certainty about a carbon tax is that it would wreak major economic damage. It would cripple the fossil-fuels industry, for starters, and that’s a very big deal for America. We boast the world’s largest reserves of traditional fuels. By the end of the next decade, we will likely be a net exporter of petroleum. The conventional-fuels industry creates good-paying jobs, including many blue-collar positions. Indeed, fracking and other advanced methods of extracting fossil fuels enabled the energy sector to lead the way in job creation throughout the recession.

The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found that the Boxer-Sanders bill would lead to 400,000 fewer jobs in 2016. In a supreme irony, the bill includes expensive and ineffective federal job-training programs to help “individuals employed by the fossil fuel industry seeking to transition to clean energy jobs.” There is Washington’s best thinking for you: Inflict damage on an expanding and functioning sector, and retrain workers for one that cannot compete economically without government help.

A carbon tax necessarily inflicts higher costs on families — directly and indirectly. Energy producers pass their tax costs on to consumers. Families see their heating and cooling bills jump and pay higher prices at the pump. But they also pay more for nearly everything they buy — from food to smartphones — because virtually every producer is paying more for energy and transportation. A tax on energy is truly a tax on everyone and everything.

Some carbon-tax apologists argue that these problems can be fixed or offset by tax cuts elsewhere. (“We’ll make it revenue-neutral!”) But that just turns bad policy into bad, complicated policy. The tax will, in all likelihood, be applied “upstream” on energy companies, rather than on consumers directly. “Hidden” taxes such as this — consumers will probably never see a carbon-tax line on their bills — are especially prone to increases, because politicians can raise rates without leaving fingerprints. Instead, they can blame higher prices on the “corporate greed” of energy companies.

Some economists argue that carbon taxes could be less harmful than corporate or capital-gains taxes, so maybe there could be a “tax swap.” But those taxes are progressive, while carbon taxes are regressive. Washington is going to tax Granny’s gas and electric bill to cut taxes for Warren Buffett? Such a concept would be dead on arrival.

To help ease the pain it would create, the Boxer-Sanders proposal would offer every lawfully present family in the country a “rebate.” But, like most one-size-fits-all “solutions,” this creates a nation of winners and losers. EPA data breaking down carbon emissions by state show that two of the three states with the lowest emissions intensity in the country just happen to be the sponsors’ home states, California and Vermont. Families there could receive more from the rebate than they would pay in extra taxes.

But families living in states with higher emissions will pay more. For example, even after the Boxer-Sanders rebates, a family of four in Indiana (ranked eighth highest in carbon intensity) would be roughly $1,700 worse off.

Overall, it would be fair to call the carbon tax a “red-state tax.” Of the 20 states that would be hardest hit by a carbon tax, only two voted for President Obama. Of the 20 states that would pay the least, 17 voted for the carbon-controller-in-chief.

Yes, Washington stands to gain hundreds of billions of tax dollars. But our struggling economy could lose much, much more. The simple fact is that Americans cannot afford a giant carbon tax: It would provide no environmental benefits, harm the general economy, and be extremely regressive, falling hardest on rural Americans and those living in red states.

— Derrick Morgan is vice president of domestic and economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.