“There’s nothing wrong with the street!”

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Why do we need gas tax? There’s nothing wrong with the streets:

“Congress can make and remake a lot of laws. They can. But the one law they can’t repeal,is the law of supply and demand; but that doesn’t stop them from trying.”
– Michael Medved on air, May 7, 2008.

Michael Medved Show May 7, 2008 (transcript):

“…Hillary has talked about, Obama too, that they’re going to go ahead and have a FTC investigation of the oil companies with price gouging; this’ll fix it all- you just watch: in a couple of weeks, price’ll be back down to…what? $1.50 a gallon, you figure? Something like that, the way they should be…right? Of course! It should be that America is spending one-fifth of what the rest of the world spends on oil and gas- why not? The Congress of the United States taking care of the problem…if you believe that they are and that some of these approaches are encouraging, give me a call.

A report in the Wall Street Journal by Stephen Power:

Calls for windfall-profits taxes, investigations of oil-price fixing and punitive actions against oil exporters are flying through the air — just as they have in almost every decade since the first major oil-price shocks of the mid-1970s.

Tuesday, the price of crude oil settled up $1.87 at $121.84 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after rising as high as $122.73.

Members of Congress are talking about measures such as blocking arms deals with Saudi Arabia, demanding OPEC’s secretary-general make himself available to testify about the bloc’s production policies or imposing windfall-profits taxes on oil companies.

This is meaningful stuff, right? If you can explain to me, why any of this would actually lower the price of gas at the pump, I’d love to hear it. To me, it is shameful; it is the most ridiculous example of the “do-something disease”: gestural politics that accomplishes nothing at all except making the problem worse, while making the politicians look good; at least for people who don’t think about this for more than 10 seconds.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama gave the same kind of approach last night in his victory speech in North Carolina. Barack Obama last night was talking about all the suffering he’s seen in this long campaign; and he talked about one particularly unfortunate individual that he encountered in the great state of Pennsylvania:

The man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he can’t afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies, a policy that’s not only keeping gas at record prices, but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet.

He doesn’t need four more years of Washington policies that sound good, but don’t solve the problem. He needs us to take a permanent holiday from our addiction from oil by making the automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future.

That’s the change we need. That’s why I’m running for president of the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

Did you just hear that? And people cheering wildly? Here he is, starting out talking about a guy who can’t afford a tank of gas…how are any of the things that Barack Obama is talking about here, forcing the automakers to build more fuel-efficient vehicles? If you want a more fuel-efficient vehicle, who’s stopping you from buying it? As a matter of fact, nobody! Right now you can read the reports! Everybody out there who is buying new cars is avoiding gas-guzzlers for obvious reasons. There’s talk that the price of oil is going to continue going up; and by the way, for those people who say that it’s meaningless…the whole John McCain idea of a gas tax holiday…?

Gas taxes, on a tank of gas, are .18¢ a gallon; and the total profit that the oil companies make is .08¢ per dollar; so…it’s about the same. In other words, about as much of what you are paying is going to the federal government in gas tax as is going total to the oil companies in terms of profit. The profit that oil companies make- and the idea that you’re going to make it harder for oil companies- Look: This is very basic; and I think it’s so basic, that, honestly, I’ve talked to my kids about it, and kids can definitely understand it- anybody can understand it:

If you want the price of gas to go down, you need to produce more gas; or to consume less of it; or both. Putting extra taxes on oil companies, doesn’t produce more gas, does it? It produces less. Why? Because the oil companies have less money to invest in getting the gas out of the ground. If you want to produce more gas, actually, one of the things that is good about rising oil prices- and it’s not all bad- is that all of a sudden it becomes more economical to get some of the petroleum that is difficult to get at…and is costly to get at. Suddenly it pencils out. But, anybody believe that somehow, as Barack says, forcing the oil companies to invest in clean energy? The government knows better about how to get more gas out of the ground? Do the oil companies want to get more gas out of the ground? Of course. Why? Because the reason they are making “record profits” is because they are selling more of their oil- that’s the same reason prices are high; because we as the world are consuming more. Most of the increase in price it’s one thing: The world’s biggest country, China, has literally hundreds of millions of people who, in the last couple of years, have begun transforming their lives from bicycles to cars. You don’t think it makes a difference? You’re talking about a country with one-and-a-half billion people?”

McCain’s Gas-Tax Plan May Be a Clunker, but not as misguided as Hillary Clinton’s windfall-profits tax.

(Balance out your reading of that last one, with this.)

Thomas Sowell, being the “admiral of awesome”:
Too “Complex”?
Pt II
Pt III

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Can’t view Medved, he helped us to the disastrous pick of John McCain. Haven’t tuned in his program since and never will again.

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Dems don’t understand economics. Economics have no FEELINGS. Dems are too beholden to special interest groups. The environmentalists are the ones putting pressure on congress to not drill and not build refineries and not build nuclear facilites. And if you liook closely, environonmentlists are directly responsible for the New Orleasn debacle. They wanted to protect their wetlands and let the silt that used to bolster up New Orleans go to protect their wetlands. The worst piece of legislation was not Roe vs. Wade but the Endangered Species Act. This act has destroyed whole families and areas of the country to save the lives of insects, animals and plants that nobody but enrironmentalists care about. And what they have done to the country and the economy!!! We would not be dependent on other countries for oil except for them. And now the senate wants us to quit putting oil inour reserves. They are nuts. What is going to happen when these Arab countries decide to quit selling us oil? We will be up a creek without a paddle. And what if they decide not to sell us oil in order to stop us from protecting ourselves? What then?

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You know BarbaraS, you always hear about how 3,000 species went extinct, TODAY!!!! 13,000,000 species will go extinct by the end of the year! and other arbitrary numbers… I always want to ask for them to name 1% of the ones going extinct this year. That’s all, just give me names for 1 out of 100 species that’ll be gone. If there are so many, they must be able to do that much… I mean I’m letting 99% die unnamed, surely they could handle 1%… right?

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One of the biggest problems for the conservative movement today, is it’s head-in-the-sand attitude over environmental issues. There are very real environmental issues, that concern a great many voters, particularly the young voters every political movement needs to sustain itself.At the moment, all the solutions are coming from the left. They might be the wrong solutions, and they might very well make matters worse, but unless conservatives can articulate conservative solutions in line with conservative principles, the field will be clear for the leftist-statists to implement whatever muddle-headedness they happen to come up with.

The great tragedy in this is that conservatives should be making all the running here. I mean, has anyone failed to notice that conservation=conservatism? Problems like pollution and species extiction are crying out for solutions based on individuals taking personal responsibility for the wider and diffuse consequences of their actions, for an end to socialist subsidies that encourage overproduction and hinder free trade, and for principled attacks from conservative standpoints on such collectivist arrangements as the idea of a “global commons” that has directly caused overfishing and exhausted certain fish stocks.

Unfortunately, many conservatives are refusing even to engage in these issues, for no better reason than that they see that these are issues associated with hippies, and conservatives hate hippies, so if they are saying something that’s annoying a hippy, they must be saying the right thing.

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mynameis probably has a point in conservatives failing to be able to articulate their message and appeal to young voters. Of course, it’s not easy when most of the major media outlets, Hollywood pop culture, and university professors lean leftward.

As an aside, in regards to endangered species, and more specifically the issue of the polar bears, here’s Hugh Hewitt:

Polar Bear Pushback
By Hugh Hewitt
Friday, May 16, 2008

After 18 years of a law practice devoted to counseling landowners, home builders and commercial interests affected by the long arm and severe penalties of the Endangered Species Act, I am used to incredulous looks and outraged oaths from clients coming to grips with the Act’s incredible burdens on impacted private citizens.

“Are you telling me I can’t build my Burger King because a Delhi Sands flower-loving fly that has never been seen and is above ground only a few days a year might be near-by?”

“I can’t build a connector road because the noise from construction might damage the hearing of the Stephens’ kangaroo rat thus impairing its reproduction?”

“All construction in San Diego involving impacts to road ruts which might contain Vernal Pool Fairy Shrimp is enjoined? All construction?”

Yes, yes, and yes. The list of situations in which the ESA has stopped otherwise legal and fully permitted projects from proceeding is extraordinarily long and getting longer. With Wednesday’s decision to list the polar bear as “threatened” the burden on the American economy brought about by the ESA grew exponentially.

I have written here and here on the polar bear controversy. Those columns delineated how the advocates of the polar bear listing planned on using the bear to impose vast new controls on the emissions of greenhouse gases across the United States. When Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced the listing, he also made a bold statement that the new status of the polar bear would not lead to such consequences.

To which the environmental activists replied immediately: “Says who?” The law is the law, they correctly noted, and it cannot be cabined by “guidance” issued by the executive branch. Here’s one example of the reality of the listing’s aftermath from the pages of USA Today:

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the group does not accept Kempthorne’s view.

The act requires federal agencies to take steps to reduce or eliminate those impacts on threatened species, she said. “There is no exemption for greenhouse gas emissions.”

If the government fails to address global warming, “we can and will go to court to enforce the law,” she said.

The industries most likely to be pummeled by the polar bear are energy production, aggregates extraction, transportation, and commercial building because each can be shown quite easily to result in increased emissions of greenhouse gases and each routinely requires federal permits to go about some aspect of their business. (The coal industry may be target number one, followed by oil drilling in the lower 48.)

The Act operates simply. Once an animal is listed, it becomes a felony to harm or harass it without the permission of the feds.

Harm or harassment has been defined to include destruction or impairment of the habitat the species actually occupies. (Some more radical views argue that harm to habitat that could be occupied in the future should also be a felony under the Act, but that view has not yet been upheld by a court of appeals.)

Because the polar bear has been listed as threatened due to alleged deterioration of its ice habitat, and because the alleged loss of the ice habitat has occurred because of global warming caused at least in part by the emission of greenhouse gases, environmental activists will argue that all emissions of greenhouse gases that flow as a consequence of the grant of a federal permit of any sort are now subject to review under the ESA and, crucially, that those permits cannot be issued unless and until the United States Fish & Wildlife Service reviews and approves of the requested permit under Section 7 of the ESA, a process which takes at a minimum months and which can cost millions of dollars even if it is successful.

Because of the generous “citizen standing” provisions of the ESA, expect dozens of “60-day” letters to begin to arrive in the offices of Secretary Kempthorne very soon, announcing that unless the Department and the Service act to invoke Section 7 vis-a-vis this or that federal permit, a lawsuit will be filed to force compliance. Expect most of those suits to be filed in the Ninth Circuit, where the appeals court has been very expansive in applying the ESA.

What ought the industries likely to be burdened by this legal blitzkrieg from the left to do?

First, industry lawyers must intervene in every polar bear suit brought by every environmental group. Trade associations must file and refile FOIA requests for all 60-day notices, and they or their members must force their way into every courtroom where the reach of the polar bear listing is argued and a decision rendered. Incredibly, not one of the industries likely to be impacted by the listing intervened in the court proceeding that imposed a deadline on Secretary Kempthorne. Not one.

Some will no doubt urge that the listing itself be challenged, but not only will proceeding that takes years, it is likely to be unsuccessful because the courts rightly defer to the exercise of scientific discretion by the agencies charged with protecting the species protected by the Act. It is not a hopeless effort, but it is also not likely to succeed.

The key will be to cabin the reach of the polar bear listing’s impact by pushing for court decisions on the limits of where Section 7 reaches, and to do so in federal circuits much more cautious about the ESA’s intent when passed by Congress and signed by Richard Nixon. In addition to the obvious constitutional arguments about whether the Interstate Commerce power was ever intended to support such far reaching claims of federal regulatory power, and statutory construction arguments on whether the ESA was ever intended to reach future habitat destruction based on predictive models (as well as the obligatory non-delegation arguments which are highly unlikely to be persuasive) the key will be to force the courts to early on confront the limits of causation when it comes to harm to the ice that the act can support. Courts must establish that it is absurd for the federal government to ever argue that project-by-project review of greenhouse gas emissions is required by the ESA or could in any way prevent ice formation or destruction.

Test cases should be brought by industry that argue that various federal permits –import/export permits, private jet landing permits, conservation banking permits– all have greenhouse gas impacts, no matter how small, and thus that they must be subject to Section 7 review. Courts ought to be forced to the far reaches of Section 7 immediately rather than over years so that the agencies do not develop a practice of automatically referring for review just the projects they want to stop. It is vital that affected industries not trust the executive branch to practice restraint or to push back against the most ambitious of the claims of environmental activist plaintiffs.

One caller to my radio show yesterday suggested targeting imports from China entering via federally-regulated ports as an opportunity to argue that the PRC is the real culprit behind skyrocketing global emissions.

Another urged a focus on the private jets that Al Gore and other activists are so fond of using to carry their climate change gospel around the globe.

An e-mailer asked whether the new Yankee Stadium is depending upon federal money or federal permits in any way as surely the traffic to and from the ball games will punch up the plight of the polar bear.

While there will be a long list of targets for test cases, the key is that industry not react to suits brought by the very accomplished lawyers of the left but that they force the tempo and choses at least some of the battlegrounds.

Swarming the courts has long been a tactic of the left, but private sector firms and sectors threatened by the threatened polar bears need to do more than sit back and wait for bills to come do and projects to be canceled. Congress under Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid will not be offering legislative relief no matter how absurd the consequences of the listing. The best hope to cut-off the imposition of Kyoto through the rulings of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is through the federal courts, and the time to act is now.

Previous blog posts of his:
Polar Bear Decision Day
The Polar Bear Pincers On Productivity

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