From MasterResource
By Robert Bradley Jr. — August 17, 2023
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has been a consistent voice for classical liberalism in energy and climate for several decades. CEI stays scholarly on the intellectual front (thank Marlo Lewis et al.) and activist on the policy front. The latest from the lean, pound-for-pound, heavy hitting think tank (letter of August 16, 2023) follows:
Dear Members of Congress:
On the first anniversary of enactment of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the undersigned organizations strongly urge you to ensure that the IRA’s Green New Deal-type policies quickly come to an end.
We recognize that in the next year complete repeal of the IRA’s harmful energy and environmental provisions is unlikely. However, clear and tangible legislative changes that make genuine progress towards that goal are realistic and expected.
IRA proponents will today be celebrating the bill’s passage. But we don’t think that a centrally planned shift to unreliable and more costly electricity, governmental efforts to reduce consumer choices, and the creation of massive handouts to special interests is in any way worth celebrating.
The Congressional Budget Office projected the IRA’s “green” subsidies to cost $391 billion; however, the total costs could be as high as $1.2 trillion, based on a more recent analysis by Goldman Sachs. As the House Ways and Means Committee explained, “[T]he main reason for the massive price tag jump is that the taxpayer funded subsidies for green energy are being claimed by large corporations, foreign competitors, and wealthy taxpayers at a much higher rate than anticipated.”
This cronyism and irresponsible spending are reason enough to dismantle the subsidies. Yet they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the IRA’s problems. Even more alarming are the IRA’s provisions empowering the government to transform how energy is produced and used in this country.
Americans shouldn’t have to worry about whether their lights will turn on when they flick the switch. Yet this is what will happen as the government seeks to force a shift away from reliable sources of electricity and towards unreliable sources. Nor should Americans have to deal with the artificially-inflated energy prices that will be the inevitable result.
The heavy-handedness of the law doesn’t stop there. It presumes that the government should limit what kinds of cars Americans can buy and the types of appliances they can use. The push for electric vehicles (EVs) is especially illuminating. Most Americans don’t want to buy EVs, and for good reason, based on their high costs and long charging times, among other problems. Yet this apparently doesn’t matter, nor do the genuine national security concerns from relying on countries like China for the minerals needed to produce EV batteries.
We commend legislators who have already been fighting to dismantle the “green” subsidies in the IRA. Legislators should use all tools available to push back against the law, including policy riders in appropriation bills and Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions of disapproval. It is important to recognize that many IRA programs still have to be implemented through rules that would be subject to the CRA.
We also want to draw attention to an issue that even many IRA proponents should be concerned about. Congress passed the IRA “green” subsidies to act as carrots and made the deliberate choice to use subsidies, and not regulations, to achieve its objectives. Nonetheless, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is ignoring the will of Congress and using IRA subsidies to help justify some of its rules, including its proposed power plant rule. We would hope that there could be a bipartisan effort to ensure that the IRA subsidies (carrots) are not improperly being used to justify regulations (sticks).
One year ago, President Biden signed the “Inflation Reduction” Act into law. It was legislation that Congress shoved through by narrow majorities in both chambers even though it makes radical and sweeping policy changes affecting the lives of all Americans. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for its passage. We strongly urge Members of the House and Senate to make dismantling the “green” subsidies in the IRA one of their top priorities. Legislators should also make it clear to subsidy recipients making decisions relying upon the continuing availability of the subsidies that they do so at their own peril.
Sincerely,
Daren Bakst: Director, Center for Energy and Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Saulius “Saul” Anuzis: President. 60 Plus Association
Melissa Ortiz: Senior Advisor, Able Americans
Paul Teller: Executive Director, Advancing American Freedom
John Droz, Jr.: Founder, Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED)
Carla Sands: Vice Chair, Center for Energy & Environment, America First Policy Institute
Phil Kerpen: President, American Commitment
Steve Pociask: President & CEO, American Consumer Institute
Jason Isaac: CEO, American Energy Institute
Richard Manning: President, Americans for Limited Government
David T. Stevenson: Director, Center for Energy & Environment, Caesar Rodney Institute
Ryan Ellis: President, Center for a Free Economy
Daniel J. Mitchell: President, Center for Freedom and Prosperity
Jeffrey Mazzella: President, Center for Individual Freedom
Craig Rucker: President, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)
Ashley Baker: Director, Public Policy, Committee for Justice
Elizabeth Stelle: Director, Policy Analysis, Commonwealth Foundation
Matthew Kandrach: President, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy
E. Calvin Beisner: President, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Craig Richardson: President, Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal)
Scott Shepard: Director, Free Enterprise Project
James Taylor: President, The Heartland Institute
Cameron Sholty: Executive Director, Heartland Impact
Mario H. Lopez: President, Hispanic Leadership Fund
Fred Birnbaum: Director, Legislative Affairs, Idaho Freedom Foundation and Idaho Freedom Action
Mandy Gunasekara: Director, Center for Energy and Conservation, Independent Women’s Forum
Heather Higgins: CEO, Independent Women’s Voice
Andrew Langer: President, Institute for Liberty
I won’t pretend I understand the intricacies of American federal legislation, but I do recognise the direction of travel.
Thanks sharing the clip – really great.
Dogs and a high seat too – very not-politically correct but love it it. Real life.
Real folk hasn’t gone away.
Powerful singer. Can’t quite decipher the message – the captions are no help. Are the rich men and the country kicking the poor folks down?
I looked up the lyrics. Clear enough:
It appears the song is making more than a few liberal craniums explode. Good enough for me.
I need to verify this, but on an online presentation yesterday, Barbara Gottlieb, Physicians for Social Responsibility, stated that the IRA will pay a credit of $3/kg for “clean” hydrogen.
A perhaps surprising point is that PSR is against nuclear power. They somehow believe that wind and solar can run everything via “electrification.”
“the IRA will pay a credit of $3/kg for “clean” hydrogen.”
Not the IRA that I know!
I’ll return to this once I see what the Americans end-game against Trump brings.
(IF) Killing Trump politically will insure much more of this rampant ideology as policy from either side of the political aisle.
Too many Republicans trying to be elected in Blue arenas for a real cohesive conservative pushback ATM.
Yes, the near future is going to be interesting. And significant.
The direction of the nation, and possibly the world, is at stake. One path is freedom, the other path is tyranny. Which will we choose? I don’t think any reasonable person would choose tyranny, but some people don’t know how to recognize creeping tyranny, and those who would impose tyranny on us try to hide their ultimate goals.
We are going to see how smart, or not, the American people are, at the next election. Do they see the existential threat to their freedoms as represented by the radical Left?
Apparently, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz does not. I heard Cruz downplaying the impeachment of Biden yesterday, saying the nation can’t just go from one impeachment to another with every change of the party in the White House.
I would agree with Cruz if it were just a matter of revenge on the opposing political party, but that’s not the case today. One politial party, the Democrats are breaking the law and undermining the U.S. Constitution, every time they are in political power (and even out of power). They are doing it now. This certainly deserves investigation and prosecution, regardless of any other consideration.
Senator Cruz, the radical Democrats are an existential threat to our Republic. In order to stop this threat, it must be publicly exposed, and that requires an investigation of everything the Democrats have done since Hillary Clinton commissioned the Russian Collusion hoax, to try to stop Trump, and Obama and Biden ran with this Russian Collusion deception to harm their political opponents and they are still running with it, and it’s about time you and the other Republicans woke up to this fact and started pushing back to stop what they are doing, not whining about endless impeachments. You are playing into Democrat hands by whining like this.
You sound like Mitch McConnell.
The U.S. Constitution and our personal freedoms are at stake. Republicans should not be useful idiots for radical Democrats.
“… I don’t think any reasonable person would choose tyranny,..”
The tyrants will; every time.
The U.S. Constitution puts in writing the basic freedoms we already have.
Any right, not specifically ceded by the sovereign states to the federal
government, stays with the sovereign states.
The problem is, when the federal government gained more size, more bureaucracy, more money, “checks and balances” became toilet paper, and it started to usurp, with salami-slicing tactics, our rights and limit our freedoms.
The Inflation Reduction Act = more government power = Bigger Government = more expensive = more printing = more inflation.
And not just out of control spending, but spending on worse-than-useless crap like wind, solar and BEVs.
None of which answer any need or solve any problem, and all of which will result in more environmental harm, not less.
BIDEN’s GREEN ENERGY POLICY MAY “END IN TEARS”
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-s-green-energy-policy-may-end-in-tears-1
Excerpt
INFLATION REDUCTION ACT; CBO estimate $391 billion, Goldman Sachs estimate $1.2 TRILLION
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which has only the US Congress as a “client”, “forecast”, as required by law, the IRA’s energy and climate provisions would cost $391 billion between 2022 and 2031, 10 years.
That turned out to be a huge under-estimate, per Goldman Sachs, which estimates the cost at $1.2 TRILLION.
The difference in cost mainly arises from lucrative tax credits in the law that are not capped, and that the Biden Administration is “loosely interpreting” the requirements for obtaining those credits
As a result of huge financial impact of the “loosely interpreting”, Goldman Sachs made another estimate of the IRA tax credits.
It turns out, they will cost tens to hundreds of billions more than CBO estimated over the next 10 years.
The Goldman Sachs forecast differences, compared the CBO estimate, total about $800 billion, such as:
Electric vehicles ($379 billion more),
“Green energy” manufacturing ($156 billion more),
Renewable electricity production ($82 billion more),
Energy efficiency ($42 billion more),
Hydrogen ($36 billion more),
Biofuels ($34 billion more) and
Plus, the forever-boondoggle, called carbon capture ($31 billion more).
The difference in the EV credit estimates is due to the projection that more vehicles will meet the law’s condition of “self-sufficiency” for minerals and battery materials to obtain the partial $3,750 consumer credit, and the full $7,500 credit.
The opportunity costs are unimaginable – what the world could have done with the trillions we’ve thrown onto the sacrificial pyre. Dreams up in smoke.