CEI: Energy/Environmental Policy for the New Congress

“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective. Policy makers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”

It is titled Free to Prosper: Energy and Environment: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 116th Congress. It is the work of the energy and environmental stalwarts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization long led by Fred L. Smith Jr. and now directed by Kent Lassman. And as always, it is reliable scholarship to inform both sides of the political aisle.

The energy White Paper is part of a broader book, Free to Prosper. The eight areas other than Energy and Environment are Regulatory Reform and Agency Oversight; Trade; Banking and Finance; Private and Public Lands; Technology and Telecommunications; Labor and Employment; Food, Drugs, and Consumer Freedom; and Transportation  That’s a lot of the federal matrix of public policy.

CEI Energy/Climate Team

The “Big Four” of CEI’s energy team are Myron Ebell (Director, Center for Energy and Environment) and three senior fellows; Marlo Lewis, Jr.; Chris Horner; and Ben Lieberman. General Counsel Sam Kazman has been front-and-center on mandated energy efficiency standards, and senior fellow Angela Logomasini specializes in federal energy and environmental research issues.

For many years, these voices have been among the most scholarly and measured in the climate debate. And they are savvy as shown by their current public campaign against CNN’s biased climate debate on Meet the Press (Chuck Todd).

The CEI energy and climate team calls it like it is, and (like their opponents) do not throw stuff just hoping something sticks to the wall. As such, they have become trusted on the free market side–and despised (and ignored as much as possible) by their emotional adversaries. “CEI campaigns to destroy the climate for centuries,” Joe Romm at ThinkProgress once wrote. And Romm’s nickname for CEI? The Completely Evil Institute …

Executive Summary

The executive summary of their Energy White Paper follows:

Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Thanks to affordable energy, the average person today lives longer and healthier, travels farther and faster in greater comfort and safety, and has greater access to information than did the privileged elites of former times. Carbon fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—provide 80 percent of U.S. energy and 87 percent of global energy. They are the world’s dominant energy sources because, in most markets, they beat the alternatives in both cost and performance.

Critics claim that carbon fuels have hidden costs that make them unsustainable. In the 1970s and 1980s, experts often depicted carbon-based fuels as both intractably polluting and rapidly depleting. Technological advances—spurred by sensible regulation and the market-driven imperative to minimize waste and improve efficiency—put the lie to those gloomy prophecies, as energy supplies increased while the air and water got much cleaner.

Today, critics claim that unchecked carbon energy use will cause catastrophic climate change. However, the climate models producing scary impact assessments project about twice as much global warming as has actually occurred. More important, the climate change mitigation policies those critics advocate pose serious risks to American prosperity, competitiveness, and living standards.

The wealth creation and technological progress made possible by affordable carbon- based energy make societies more resilient, as they protect people from extreme weather, power health-improving innovation, and increase life expectancy. Since the 1920s, global deaths and death rates from extreme weather have decreased by 93 percent and 98 percent, respectively.

The war on affordable energy also raises serious humanitarian concerns. Energy costs already impose real burdens on low-income households, including reduced expenditures for food, medicine, and education and late credit card payments. “Consensus” climatology implies that the Paris climate treaty’s objective of limiting average global temperatures to 2°C above preindustrial levels cannot be accomplished without massive cuts in developing countries’ current consumption of carbon-based fuels. Putting the developing world on an energy diet is bound to be a cure worse than the supposed disease.

Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective. Policy makers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, “First, do no harm,” should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.

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