RGGI is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, created by a group of ten northeastern states. RGGI runs a carbon trading scheme with the primary goal to reduce CO₂ emissions. Permits are auctioned off quarterly, September’s auction only sold 75% of the permits available, and December’s sold only 57%. The sale price has a $1.86 per ton floor, and that’s what they sold at.
The money raised goes to the state governments as a function of their population size. The intent is that money then goes to various projects ranging from improving insulation on homes to heat exchangers at a paper mill, to an organization that helped create RGGI and then got grants from it.
The “poor” auction performance in the last two auctions is due in part to the recession and also to increased natural gas supplies. There is work afoot to bring in another Hydro-Quebec DC power line that will carry as much power as a large power plant, and proceeds from future auctions are expected to remain low.
The recession brings a secondary hit on energy efficiency spending. Three states, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey, have tapped RGGI funds for unrelated expenses such as school aid and general fund assistance. Not surprisingly, critics point to this as more evidence that RGGI is just another tax and not a program to benefit rate payers. Even without the diversion RGGI is an energy tax. The New Hampshire fuel tax is written into the state constitution as being for highway maintenance. The State Highway Patrol have managed to be considered maintenance, but that’s as far astray as the fuel tax goes.
Like most states, New Hampshire has had a sizable turnover in the state legislature, and there is a move afoot to withdraw. A story in the Dec 26 Manchester Union Leader (on paper or subscription only) reports on the effort to find supporters before writing the bill. Some supporters say there’s enough support to make passage likely.
There’s no conclusion to this post, this effort is currently a work in progress and I may write a few updates before I can write a conclusion.
Other sources of information for this post not linked above:
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/12/06/rggi-permit-price-remains-low-43-go-unsold/
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4723555
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Thanks, Ric, I appreciate you following this issue. RGGI is currently in the process of considering lowering the number of CO2 allocations, increasing the price, or both. It has not made any progress toward its avowed objective of lowering CO2 emission, rather it has just functioned as a cash cow (read tax). And, as you have indicated, some of the money raised for the noble purpose of increasing efficiency and’or lowering CO2 emissions is being siphoned off for other purposes. A crack in the RGGI facade is important, particularly since RGGI is the only required cap’n-trade functioning in the US.
What a scam. Unbelievable. P. T. Barnum would be impressed.
I live in Exeter NH, and can only hope that our recent very, very promising election will put an end to these expensive boondoggles and bring electoral sanity for the first time in years. We have no state tax or sales tax, and we would very much like to keep it that way. Live Free or Die! The clowns of the last 4-6 years even tried to remove this, our great motto, because it was too politically incorrect. They were removed, instead, because they were incorrect.
Let’s see:
In a related issue in Chicago, the city has been selling off assets to pay for the corrupt and ever growing “public servants”.
1) The City of Chicago approved the sale of the Skyway to the MIG-Cintra consortium for US$1.83bn (A$2.46bn). As agreed with the City this amount has been adjusted for movement in the 10 year Treasury note yield from 12 October 2004.1
http://www.macquarie.com.au/au/mig/news/20041028.htm
2) Chicago sells rights to city parking meters for $1.2 billion
http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2008/12/24/chicago-sells-right-to-city-parking-meters-for-1-2-billion.aspx
I’ll stop there, the sale of Midway Airport isn’t going well.
These sales of, revenue generating public facilities, only encourage the incompetence/corruption of our elected officials.
They are selling our childrens futures, to balance their out of control spending.
Thanks for posting this, Ric. It will be interesting to see if/how this attempt progresses. Standing firmly in the way of course, would be our unprecedented 4-term Democratic governor, John Lynch.
“Live Free or Die” – promote conservation, not dictatorship. No wonder that the “Old Man of the Mountain” no longer wanted to show his face in the state.
On a vacation through Italy, my wife and I met a couple from New Hampshire. Met once in Venice (sat next to us at a restaurant) and then again in Sienna (pure coincidence). Very nice people and very committed to local governance is what I remember. I’ve been been a fan of New Hampshire since (this is from a Texan).
“The intent is that money then goes […] to an organization that helped create RGGI and then got grants from it.”
I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell ya’!
Interesting news, Ric. Thanks for the news from your neck of the woods.
Good news. I’m a Stratham, NH resident who is hopeful that the new legislature will trim or better yet abolish all such unnecessary govt initiatives.
It is funny how all of these enlightened “save the earth” efforts always end up a boondoggle, but with a big chunk of the proceeds going to eco-fascists instead of the usual suspects. Rather I should say to the new usual suspects. The old usual suspects must be jealous… It pays to be a protester now.
I am reluctant to comment on what political decisions are made in other place than the one I live in. This RGGI thing raises lots of red flags in my skeptical mind. The thing sounds more like a pork barrel slush fund then anything else. Since we elect our leaders we get exactly what we voters deserve and noting more.
Who are the rent seekers?
I’m not sure if the statistic still holds, but while I lived in N.H., the state was home to the 4th largest governmental body in the world, coming in behind British Parliament, Canada, and Australia. The government was very much “by the people”, I think the rep from our town changed every 2yrs. (may have been 1yr) and received recompense of $200. You served your stint because it was your duty…and people that I knew were proud to do it.
The good old days…
JimB
First T.B.Pickens now N.H., may it keep rolling down hill with the rest of AGW nonsense!!!
At 5:19 PM on 26 December, u.k.(us) had written about:
.
There’s a question gone a-begging here.
Just what the hell is the City of Chicago – a corporate entity with a very, very, very limited remit – doing with any kind of “revenue generating public facilities” in the first place?
As a libertarian, I’m prone to observe that the only real reason for suffering the existence of civil government in any form whatsoever is that when killer apes (species Homo sapiens) gather into society we require a choke-chained agency to manage the objective employment of retaliatory violent force as a deterrent against those who might seek to violate the individual rights – to life, to liberty, and to property – of their fellow human beings.
That’s it. There’s no other purpose to which the armed thugs of government can ever legitimately turn their hands. Government is (in the words of Thomas Paine) “a punisher.”
It ain’t there to run airports or highways or any other kind of “revenue generating public facilities.” If there’s a viable market demand for such goods and services, government is emphatically not the entity in society to deliver said goods and services.
If there’s not such a market demand as to make building and running such “revenue generating public facilities” profitable, however in hell could it be financially feasible for private investors seeking return on their outlay to buy ’em from the City of Chicago?
Some years ago, a researcher was trying to compare the relative per-pupil administrative costs of private versus government school systems, and decided that Chicago would make a good quick test case. The Archdiocese of Chicago pretty much overlapped the jurisdiction of Chicago city government, and so the researcher could ask a few questions about number of administrative employees and the total payroll.
First, he went to the public school system. Agony. Nobody had all the information he wanted, it seemed. See person “A,” who referred him to bureaucrat “B,” who sent him along to human resources drone “C,” who told him that authorizing officer “D” was out of the country on vacation, and the computer was down, and the filing system was all in a mess from their recent move to a bigger building….
Well, you get the picture. It took a bit longer than a month for him to track the numbers down, and it was like performing root canal on an orca without benefit of sedatives or a wet suit. Slippery, messy, and at any moment you were aware that you could be pulling back a bloody stump.
That accomplished, he phoned the Yellow Pages number for the administrative office of the Chicago Parochial Schools System. He got a very nice lady on the line. He asked: “How many people work in administration for the parochial schools in Chicago?”
There was a moment’s wait, and he got ready for the hand-off to this outfit’s version of clueless wastoid “A.”
The nice lady said: “Well, I’m not sure. Can you hold on while I count them?”
Turned out that the Chicago parochial schools were educating about one-tenth the total number of students in the K-12 range as the public school system was handling (and graduating much higher percentages of them with diplomas) with about one-hundredth the administrative overhead in both numbers of people and monetary cost.
There are a lot of things that civil government should not be doing. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is merely one more of them.
So how do we get the officers of civil government to stop doing those things which are not best handled by (again resorting to Thomas Paine) “an armed banditti” and get this bloated cancer trimmed down to a small enough size that it is no longer doing us the massive damage we presently suffer?
The problem with the City of Chicago (getting a bit off topic here) was not that it sold the Skyway or the right to manage the parking meters, but that it used the proceeds — which were essentially a one-time payment in exchange for a long-running revenue stream — to pay current costs. It’s like taking out a 50 year 2nd mortgage and using the money to pay the utilities that year.
ShrNfr says:
December 26, 2010 at 5:38 pm (Edit)
At a public “listening session” I strongly recommended that the Governor’s Task Force on Climate Change decouple conservation from climate change lest the conservation activity go down with climate change. I also told them hurricanes were a bigger risk than sea level rise and there should be more about adapting to Hurricanes.. They listened, and ignored….
JimB says:
December 26, 2010 at 7:50 pm (Edit)
Still is. The state senate has 24 members, each gets paid $200 per biennium, so $100 a year. However, they get their own secretary. The state house has 400 seats, about one per 3000 residents. Same pay, but they have to share a secretary. The state sumpreme court screwed up the last district setting. They got involved because the R&Ds couldn’t come up with a new districting plan, and the court went overboard with trying to even out the number of reps, so now instead of one rep, I have something like six at large from several towns.
Dennis Nikols, P. Geol. says:
December 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm (Edit)
It’s not as bad as it could be, but yeah, it needs to be watched/replaced.
Everyone wants to get in on the biggest new scam, before the people wise up and lose all their money. What was it last time, Feed Lots? Most of us know it as Cap & Trade but it’s all the same scam to redistribute wealth. You remember when Obama talked about it during his campaign. Only thing is most people thought he meant to redistribute it to Americans…..lol
I can’t wait till this guy is out of office so we can find out what he’s really all about. You can count on it, that when he’s out of office the media will turn on him and all the smut will come out.
Hi Ric
I worked with PDP11, on the first ever (anywhere) commercial broadcast of teletext service ( ITV’s Oracle ) in 1974 in the UK.
Just another tax, albeit, more elaborate than just “raise the property tax”. CO2 taxation will thusly die a long slow death due to the simple fact that politicians are drawn to tax and spend as matter is drawn to a black hole. The results are about the same.
Tucci78
“It ain’t there to run airports or highways or any other kind of “revenue generating public facilities.” If there’s a viable market demand for such goods and services, government is emphatically not the entity in society to deliver said goods and services.”
Yes, but….
Government exists to do that which is beneficial to the vast majority, but which isn’t feasible to be done by solitary actors. Police and military are one example, which you *site* [cite].
Other examples would include the paved road system. Corporate entities would have no incentive to build or maintain the road system (which was a HUGE boon to the US) back when created, and even today with modernization, every single road out there would be a toll road. While it might be cheaper in total dollar amounts collected to service it, additional expenses would accumulate from wasted gas sitting in lines, lost productive time, etc. Cheaper isn’t always better (though cheaper doesn’t always mean inferior either!)
I have libertarian leanings, but there are some things which are clearly the provinance of government, simply because they can afford to take the “big picture” approach to a problem and not have to tell shareholders that it will take 30 years for a project to pay for itself, when the shareholders are concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company.
When crossing by RV into Canada we were stopped and inspected for gun possession. I asked why he thought two old retired people would be carrying an illegal gun into Canada. He pointed to our vehicle plate – Live Free or Die. Unfortunately many new residents, with more liberal attitudes want to eliminate our motto, not realizing it is a part of why they moved to NH.
New Hampshire is a hope for the rest of the nation; almost half the unemployment rate of the nation, relatively low taxes, no income tax, no sales tax. Top SAT scores. Lots of legislators paid a little ($100/year). True we’ve had a governor that spent like crazy for a few years but hopefully he’s getting the message after the last election.
NH is a magic place in many ways. The NH way should be broadcast to the nation and the folly of CA, IL, NY, DC…. and maybe might be gotten under control.
Dennis Nikols, P. Geol. says:
December 26, 2010 at 7:18 pm
The thing sounds more like a pork barrel slush fund then anything else.
It’s far more insidious than that. It is driving our already-high electric rates even higher, and forcing electric utilities to purchase “green” energy. That “green” energy will then be locked into our rates for many years. It is causing local and state government to spend money even more foolishly than they might otherwise, and that is money not likely to be recouped.
And therein lies the reason for the continued stream of funded AGW research projects, Hansen’s paycheck, Jones’ continued position, Gore’s profits, etc, ad infinitum ad nauseum.
“The money raised goes to the state governments as a function of their population size. The intent is that money then goes to various projects ranging from improving insulation on homes to heat exchangers at a paper mill, to an organization that helped create RGGI and then got grants from it.”
Regardless of the whether or not AGW is a fact, this money stream must stop wherever it occurs, and its legality as a form of kickback must be questioned and indeed outlawed.
New Hampshire grew the fastest of any northeast state according to 2010 census results. Most of them shrank as the exodus to southern states continued. New Hampshire must have been an alternative destination for those who wanted to escape liberal nanny state governments but didn’t want to drive so far or learn to speak with a drawl.