Harry Reid and other democratic leaders in the Senate have clearly indicated that cap-and-trade legislation will be put off at least, until what they call “spring”, which is long after the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen next month. At the same time, President Obama has said that the U.S., along with China, will announce some type of emissions cap in Copenhagen. Obviously this cannot refer to legislation that has yet to be voted on in the Senate.

President Obama keeps using the language “operationally significant” when referring to what the U.S. will agree to in Copenhagen. The only way that he can get around the Senate and still have a credible position in Copenhagen is for the EPA to announce specific regulations for carbon dioxide emissions between now and the conclusion of the Copenhagen meeting in mid-December.

In 2007, supposedly fail-safe circuits in Metrorail’s train detection and control system began to “intermittently malfunction.” This contributed to at least one near miss before the fatal crash, and was the other major reason why nine people died in June.

Clearly, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority is short of funds. It still has not begun to replace the 298 cars; instead, it is merely inserting them into the middle of trains so that, in the event of a crash, the will be buffered by newer (and hopefully stronger) cars.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, it will cost nearly $50 billion to bring rail lines in Washington and five other urban areas — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco — up to a “state of good repair.” Current rates of spending are not even adequate to keep these systems in the miserable condition they are in today. As an official with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says with resignation, “there will never be enough money” to restore New York’s rail system to a state of good repair (see p. 15).

The problem, of course, is that rail transit does not come close to paying for itself out of transit fares. Fares cover about 60 percent of the cost of operating Washington’s Metrorail system, but none of the costs of building or maintaining it — and has one of the highest cost recovery ratios in the industry. Transit agencies have convinced most legislators that transit shouldn’t have to pay for itself — but that leaves them perennially short of funds and their patrons in danger of deadly accidents.

Legislators love to fund “ribbons, not brooms” — that is, new, highly visible projects such as the $5.2 billion silver line to Dulles Airport rather than the cost of maintaining the existing system.

So what’s the solution? How about federal regulation of transit agencies? That won’t solve any of the problems, but at least we’ll have a whole new layer of bureaucracy to blame the next time people are killed in a train crash.

The real solution is to stop building expensive rail transit lines that cities can’t afford to maintain. Transit should be privatized, which will lead transit companies to run vehicles — mostly buses — where people want to go, not where bureaucrats and politicians decide they ought to go.

The Obama administration has endorsed these policies. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan have agreed to require metropolitan areas to adopt compact-development policies or risk losing federal transportation and housing funds. LaHood has admitted that the goal of this program is to "coerce people out of their cars."

As such, compact-development policies represent a huge intrusion on private property rights, personal freedom, and mobility. They are also fraught with risks. Urban planners and economists are far from unanimous about whether such policies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some even raise the possibility that compact city policies could increase emissions by increasing roadway congestion.

Such reductions are insignificant compared with the huge costs that compact development would impose on the nation. These costs include reduced worker productivity, less affordable housing, increased traffic congestion, higher taxes or reduced urban services, and higher consumer costs. Those who believe we must reduce carbon emissions should reject compact development as expensive, risky, and distracting from tools, such as carbon taxes, that can have greater, more immediate, and more easily monitored effects on greenhouse gas emissions.

Smart-growth planners believe that Americans live the wrong way, and they use land-use regulation to impose on others what they believe is the right way to live. Surveys consistently show that all but 15 percent to 25 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes with a yard, but planners think we would be better off if a much higher percentage lived in high-density apartments or condos.

Consider my former hometown of Portland, Ore., which many consider the nation's leader in smart-growth planning. To increase urban densities, planners are turning dozens of neighborhoods of single-family homes into apartments and condos. While past land-use rules set maximum densities, Portland's rules set minimum densities.

This means if your neighbors own a vacant lot, they cannot build a single-family house on it; they must build a rowhouse or apartment. In some cases, regulation is so strict that, if your house burns down, you cannot rebuild it; you must replace it with an apartment.

Portland planners soon decided that rowhouses and low-rise apartments were not dense enough, so they increased height limits to 50 feet or 60 feet to allow four- and five-story mid-rise apartments. Even that isn't dense enough, so now they are beginning to encourage high-rises.

After the first high-density developments saturated the demand, planners supplemented land-use mandates with tax breaks, below-market land sales and other subsidies to developers who built high-density housing. This means Portland neighborhoods continue to be invaded by mid-rise and high-rise developments, even though there is no more demand for dense housing.

Many of these developments are in transit corridors. Yet independent studies reveal that the people living in them don't ride transit significantly more than residents of single-family neighborhoods.

Portlanders did not welcome densification. Almost all of the targeted neighborhoods fought it; almost all of them lost. Planners followed a divide-and-conquer strategy, taking one neighborhood at a time so opponents could not build up enough momentum to stop the process.

Increased densities destroyed the small-town atmosphere that once made Portland attractive. Congestion is worse, housing and consumer costs are high, and urban services such as fire, police and schools have declined as the city took money from these programs to subsidize high-density developers.

Despite these problems, scores of cities from Missoula, Mont., to San Diego, Calif., have passed similar smart-growth regulations. Planners want to use smart growth everywhere they can, including Houston.

To get out of Portland, I moved to an exurban neighborhood 150 miles away. Like many Houston neighborhoods, we have a homeowners association and deed restrictions, so we will never have to worry about outside planners imposing some unwanted development on us.

Unlike most other cities, Houston makes it easy to create homeowners associations in neighborhoods that do not have them. Houston's system of deed restrictions puts you and your neighbors in charge of your neighborhood's future.

By contrast, smart-growth planning puts your neighborhood's future in the hands of people who may know little about you or your neighbors and whose ideas about how you should live may be very different from yours. If you want to protect your neighborhood from high-rises and other unwanted developments, then smart-growth planning is the last thing you need.

The authors readily admit, quite early in the piece, that they are usually on opposing sides of the trade debate.  The Peterson Institute scholars are well-known and well-respected advocates of freer international trade. Global Trade Watch, and Wallach in particular? Not so much. She has called NAFTA a “disastrous experiment” and has a special section on her website calling on people to Take Action! on trade (example: by hosting a house party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of ” the historic 1999 Seattle protest victory of people power over corporate rule.”)

Yet here they are, claiming to agree on “a suprising number of aspects of the climate change debate and on the related need to overhaul global trade negotiations.” I am still trying to make sense of the op-ed, because it lurches around a bit, and to work out exactly how deep the agreement of these strange bedfellows really is. But for now, let me comment briefly on what I think is the main thrust of their op-ed: a proposal for launching a new round of trade talks.

The authors point out that a new treaty on global warming would “require new trade rules in intellectual property, services, government procurement and product standards.” So, hey, why not combine that into trade talks?The Obama Round (as if Obama-worship has not gone far enough) “would include, as a centerpiece, addressing these potential commercial and climate trade-offs and updating the negotiating agenda.”

That, quite frankly, would be fatal for the World Trade Organization. Developing countries, now in the majority in the WTO, are in general very resistant to the idea of bringing extraneous issues into its agenda (witness constant struggles over linking trade to labor and environment issues, to name just two). More to the point, we already have a round in progress. The Doha round has been struggling over old-fashioned trade concerns like tariffs and subsidies (remember them?)  since launching in 2001. The risks of overburdening the WTO agenda are, in my opinion, far greater than the possible benefits. It’s fairly clear to me why Wallach would advocate a new round full of poison pills, but not so clear why Bergsten would put his name to such a suggestion.

It’s not even clear to me that such an approach would “help the environment.” Why the optimism about the possibility of agreement under the auspices of the WTO when negotiations in forums designed explicitly and solely for the purpose of halting climate change have been unsuccessful?

( Speaking of which, expectations for a breakthrough at the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change are being rapidly scaled back, with talk of an “interim” agreement — likely some anodyne political statement — rather than the final deal that environmental groups had hoped for. The international diplomacy circus rolls on, though: conferences are planned for Mexico and South Africa — talk about a carbon footprint! — next year.)

For my take on the climate change and trade debate, the solution to which does not involve launching an Obama Round, see here.

Meanwhile, those concerned about the cost of climate change regulations may have lost an ally. Often, but not always, one can depend on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend free enterprise, or at least free trade. On climate change, however, they are a little more ambiguous. If anything, they appear to be getting more sympathetic to climate change legislation. Nothing to do with membership defections, they assure us, just good business practice. Maybe it is. I’m not a member of the Chamber so their strategy is not really any of my business.

What concerns me is the apparent shift in their position toward so-called carbon tariffs (also called “border adjustment measures,” and often spoken of in terms of “international competitiveness,” “negotiating leverage” and other terms that should raise the alarm). My friend, and former Catoite, Scott Lincicome does an excellent job here of parsing through the Chamber’s recent public letter in support of  the Kerry-Graham “framework” (outlined in this New York Times op-ed) and their strange silence on the framework’s inclusion of the need for carbon tariffs, so I won’t repeat his analysis here. Suffice to say, their non-comment on the issue of carbon tariffs is worrying. As Scott points out, they appear to endorse the concept, if in a coded manner.

Back in June, the Chamber explicitly opposed Waxman-Markey, in part because “It would also impose carbon tariffs on goods imported into the U.S., a move that would almost certainly spur retaliation from global trading partners.” (See here.) I would feel a lot more comfortable if a similarly explicit statement had been repeated in their letter.

In the blame game, the Obama administration isn't about to stop with Fox News. Instead, it's moving on to lowly scientists.

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying "those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary."

Then, the president talked tough, saying, "We'll just have to deal with those people," language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn't the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end.

The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it's pretty cold). The earth's surface is dominated by two very different substances — uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans — so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well.

Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so — a common occurrence — temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there's a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken.

Finally, there's carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved.

And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide–induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century.

What you can say is happening to the climate depends on the period you choose to study. Using the surface-temperature record that scientists cite the most, you will find a significant cooling trend after 2000. You'll find no significant trend whatsoever if you start in any year between 1996 and 2000. Beginning your trend before 1996 will yield you significant warming. And so forth.

It's therefore not surprising that anyone can see anything on the climate Ouija board.

In fact, though, there's only one thing that is clear: For the last decade and a half, our climate has not behaved in accordance with the predictions of most climate models. They just don't predict such a long hiatus in warming even as carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity continue to climb.

Note to the president: I do not say that to "defeat or delay" your policies on climate change. The fact is that the U.S. Senate is likely to do that anyway, with or without this information. Early on Election Day, the GOP boycotted a session of the Environment and Public Works Committee in protest of a climate-change bill's costs, and Democrats were split on the legislation as well. Tuesday's election results are likely to give Blue Dog Democrats further pause.

If the Senate does not pass a climate bill that is acceptable to the president, Obama is almost certain to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions that he can take to the Copenhagen climate conference next month as evidence of America's efforts. These will then be used to extract some vague concessions on the part of the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, and the Copenhagen Protocol will be hailed as a major victory over global warming.

Of course, it will be no such thing. If the EPA does issue global-warming regulations, it will have to defend the science that it uses to raise the price of virtually everything. And it is true, Mr. President, that people will use the inconvenient facts of recent climate behavior to defeat or delay the "change" the EPA commands. The administration may respond by "working on" the global-warming people it doesn't like, but it can't "work on" the obvious and growing disconnect between what was forecast and what is happening.

The administration did a great job of increasing the ratings of Fox News. Maybe it can do the same for dissident scientists.

There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically.

Darned if he isn’t using terms like “atheists” and “disbelief” in a discussion of global warming. Almost as if he were, you know, a theologian.

Reporter Sarah Gardner, by the way, says that “in my own lifetime, average temperatures in this country have gone up more than 2 degrees.” That doesn’t sound like that much — maybe like moving from Washington to Richmond? But anyway, unless Sarah is about 200 years old, she seems to be exaggerating.

For a different view of global warming — not that of an atheist or even a skeptic, just a non-fundamentalist or non-apocalyptic — see this short paper or this book by climatologist Pat Michaels.

The conservative case for government intervention in energy markets is just as flimsy as the liberal case for government intervention in any other sector of the economy. Energy markets may not work as perfectly as in a textbook model, but they work — and government works even less perfectly.

Consider one of the premises underlying the present energy-policy debates: the fear that our reliance on foreign oil leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions. Most conservatives seem to believe that a reduction in imports will insulate us from price shocks caused by developments overseas. That is nonsense. A supply disruption anywhere will increase the price of crude oil everywhere for the same reason that an early frost in Florida will increase the price of citrus produced in Florida and California by roughly the same amount. Energy independence provides no protection against supply disruptions abroad.

Others fear that reliance on imports requires us to undertake military commitments to ensure that oil continues to flow. But producers have even more reason to worry about the safety of their facilities than we do and, likewise, more reason to ensure the security of international oil-shipping lanes. Hence, they have every incentive to defend their oil infrastructure, whether we help foot the bill or not.

No less a conservative than Dick Cheney argues that producers and consumers make bad decisions in energy markets: They fail to appreciate the profit opportunities associated with certain investments, he says, be they renewable, nuclear, clean coal, ethanol — whatever. Consumers, the argument goes, are too risk-averse to make expensive bets on promising technology, while they discount the certainty of energy depletion and the dwindling of power supplies. And, Cheney says, producers' time horizons are too short to invest in energy technologies that offer long-term promise. But economists investigating the issue find little evidence for assertions like Cheney's, and little reason to believe that markets in energy are different from markets in other commodities.

Policy activists are on somewhat firmer ground, however, when they argue that energy prices do not fully reflect the environmental costs associated with energy consumption. But economists are wildly divergent in their estimates of the costs of these energy-consumption externalities. Some studies find that present prices for conventional fuels, such as natural gas, are too high rather than too low — owing to regulatory distortions in the market.

In the case of fuels for which the evidence about environmental externalities is clear, the solution is a tax that increases the price and allows producers and consumers complete freedom to adjust. But that would create visible costs and diffuse benefits, and politicians prefer the opposite: concentrated benefits for companies that collect subsidies and diffuse costs imposed on the taxpayers and the economy.

The strongest critique of a laissez-faire energy regime is that innovators in energy markets cannot capture the full benefits of their innovations. Hence, businessmen may underinvest in energy research and development. Notice that the complaint, however, is that industry will underinvest in R&D across the board — not that investors back the wrong technologies. If this is a serious problem, the solution is to make all R&D more attractive through preferences in the tax code. Targeted energy R&D subsidies and mandates simply substitute political judgments about investments for market judgments, even though politicians have no comparative advantage in sorting technological winners from losers.

Consider the current love affair of the Right with "clean coal" technology. Billions of federal tax dollars have been spent since the 1980s on various iterations of this concept — most recently via George W. Bush's "FutureGen" project and the "Clean Coal Power Initiative" — yet the marketplace has not been friendly to new coal plants. From 2001 through 2007, 179,382 megawatts of natural-gas-fired electric generators were added, but only 3,311 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity came online.

It's not that we don't know how to make coal facilities cleaner — it's that we don't know how to make coal plants both cleaner and profitable. Throwing more tax money at this riddle will not necessarily produce an answer. Why are conservatives doubling down on the same ill-fated taxpayer adventure that Ronald Reagan labored so mightily to kill in the 1980s?

Nuclear power is another favored recipient of conservative largesse. Despite promises in the 1950s that nuclear power would soon become "too cheap to meter," 50 years of lavish federal subsidies and regulatory preferences have yet to produce an industry that can turn a profit without taxpayer help. That is an observation that even the nuclear-energy industry's trade association freely concedes, at least when it is time for politicians to reconsider the merits of existing subsidies such as the federal guarantee of private loans to the industry, federal protection against liabilities beyond a certain threshold, production tax credits, and the like. Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf calculates that nuclear-power costs would increase by almost 50 percent if those subsidies were eliminated.

How is the conservative case for the above subsidies any different from the liberal case for subsidizing solar or wind energy, or high-mileage automobiles — or, for that matter, the case for government backing of financial institutions and automobile companies? It isn't, and conservatives should not check their skepticism about central planning and the bureaucratic ordering of markets at the door when they walk into the energy-policy funhouse. There is no BTU exception to The Wealth of Nations.

Where's the headline? Where's the television camera? Anyone out there?

It's right there in the September 24 issue of the refereed journal Geophysical Research Letters. The senior author is Marc Tedesco of City College of New York, not exactly off the mainstream media's beaten path. The work was sponsored by NASA.

Every summer (our winter), the edges of Antarctica warm up just enough for some snow to melt. Obviously, a little warming will create quite a bit more melting, which is a factor in dreaded sea-level rise from global warming.

Satellites have been monitoring this activity in both the North and South polar regions since 1980. What Tedesco wrote was this: "A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-09" (emphasis added).

Here's a graph of his snowmelt data. It was obscured in a very busy chart in the original paper, so I've taken the liberty of stripping it out to stand alone.

Summer Melt in Antarctica Appears to be Declining, not Increasing.

It's obvious that it's not just this year that is of interest. The last three years are clearly those with the lowest aggregate melt on record. You might even see a downward trend since the beginning of the record in 1980.

It's a reasonable surmise that there was no press coverage because there was no press release. NASA is keeping this thing hushed up. (We wouldn't expect environmental journalists to occasionally glance at the scientific literature, such as Geophysical Research Letters, right?).

The Agency is also highly selective about the global warming science it chooses to trumpet. For example, Tedesco has also published on melting in Greenland, and NASA wrote press releases on those papers, which were not nearly as newsworthy as the thirty-year decline in Antarctic melt. Examples:

May 29, 2007: NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in Greenland. "In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years." Stop the presses! The last we heard each and every year has a fifty-fifty chance of being above (or below) average.

September 20, 2007: NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland. "…Only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in snow melting…researchers [including Tedesco] …confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland…melting at higher altitudes than ever, and increasingly melting on Antarctica's largest ice shelf." How on earth does this square with the obvious decrease in melt just published by the same researchers? Doesn't this press release demand another on the newer work?

Earth to NASA: The 2007 Antarctic paper used twenty years of data, the 2009 paper has the entire record back to 1980. Even looking at the graph through 1998, it's apparent that there is no net increase in melt.

September 25, 2007: NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places. This one is unbelievably misleading. "In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than twice the surface size of the U.S.". This is patently impossible — as Greenland's total area is about a quarter of that of the lower 48 states.

There's more. In the most recent paper, Tedesco and his co-authors take pains not to step on a highly publicized study of surface temperature trends published by University of Washington's Eric Steig that was hailed as evidence for human-induced warming. At the time it was published, critics pointed out that there was no trend whatsoever in recent decades and that what warming had occurred took place before the great increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Indeed, Tedesco begins his conclusions by stating that his results "do not contradict" the Steig study. Why? According to Tedesco, because Steig's work begins in the 1950s, long before his 1980 start date. All this did was to confirm that warming pretty much stopped three decades ago. Where's that press release?

NASA's seems to beat the drum only when the news on global warming is bad, and remains mute when it is good. And, for that matter, so is that of the environmental journalism community, apparently incapable of filing an original story about an article from a refereed scientific journal that flies in the face of previous reportage on climate change.

Based on the above contention, the Kyoto Protocol imposes no direct costs on developing countries and holds out the prospect of large amounts of transfer payments from industrialized to developing countries via the Clean Development Mechanism or an Adaptation Fund. Not surprisingly, virtually every developing country has ratified the Protocol and is adamant that these features be retained in any son-of-Kyoto.

For their part, UN and other multilateral agencies favor this approach because lacking any taxing authority or other ready mechanism for raising revenues, they see revenues in helping manage, facilitate or distribute the enormous amounts of money that, in theory, should be available from ICs to fund mitigation and adaptation in the DCs.

Continue reading here.

If the G-20 leaders really want to demonstrate commitment to action on climate change, they would do well to be more careful about sticking to their commitments when it comes to open international trade.

Many lofty sentiments were displayed at both events. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced that the world is "one step closer" to a climate change deal. But he declined, of course, to point out that this particular journey of a thousand miles looks increasingly precarious and that one step is nowhere near enough progress for those hoping for a final deal in December.

The new Japanese Prime Minister made nice with his colleagues by reaffirming his vow to reduce his country's emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. China's President Hu Jintao only went so far as to promise his country would reduce emissions by a "notable" margin, but at least sounded receptive to emissions reduction efforts. President Obama gave yet another eloquent speech, which though short on specifics, conveyed that the United States accepted responsibility for past damage, while continuing to insist on efforts from "rapidly-growing developing nations."

On trade, the G-20 will no doubt pledge to work hard to complete the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations by 2010, and to keep trade open in the meantime. Unfortunately,its record in this area is not great.

The governing body has consistently, if hypocritically in view of its subsequent actions, issued statements emphasizing the importance of avoiding protectionism amid a global financial crisis, only to have its members do the opposite. Too often the temptation among G-20 countries to subsidize and protect their own has proven too great to resist.

The political tension between protection-seeking domestic constituencies and those in favor of more open trade is beginning to appear in the climate change debate. Importantly, the free flow of goods and environmental soundness are not necessarily at odds.

Indeed, because trade leads to wealth, and wealth to an increased desire and ability to protect the environment, the two are complementary. Nonetheless, many G-20 leaders are doing their best to set them up as being inalterably opposed. President Sarkozy earlier this month became the latest politician to call for carbon tariffs to "level the playing field" for French products that will attract a carbon tax and yet compete with untaxed imports.

Similar sentiments are held among certain U.S. politicians too. Senators from manufacturing states crucial to securing passage of a climate bill have repeatedly insisted that their support depends on protection for vulnerable domestic industries. They continue to argue that Chinese imports are threatening U.S. jobs in energy intensive industries, even though more than two-thirds of those types of products come from other similarly rich (and, in some cases, greener) countries.

President Obama spoke out against punitive trade measures inserted into the House bill when it passed in June, but declined to say whether he would veto a final bill if it contained the same elements. He has demonstrated little willingness to resist the siren song of protectionism, judging from his actions on trade since assuming the presidency. He also displayed a lack of appreciation for the foreign policy implications of protectionism in announcing tariffs on Chinese tires just prior to a climate summit where the country's cooperation was considered crucial.

Alienating the Chinese by threatening them with trade barriers would be a big mistake. And considering that the U.S. accounts for less than one percent of the market for Chinese energy-intensive goods as is, tariffs would create even less of an incentive among producers to clean up their production techniques for what would be a shrinking market. What they will do is increase the costs of U.S. producers who use Chinese inputs, and ultimately, of U.S. consumers.

Protectionism in the name of climate change carries little upside and much risk, for the environment and for the global economy. Leaders who care about either or both goals should start fulfilling their own pledges on open trade.

From an outsider's perspective, religious displays of self-inflicted pain can seem pointlessly barbaric. But many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists believe they have an important function: to facilitate collective action by requiring members to send a costly, hard-to-fake signal of commitment to the group's common creed.

The same impulse, in a rather less impassioned form, seems to animate the Democrats' climate change bill. Coordinating international political action to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions is a collective action problem of grand, global scale. One way to achieve and maintain such coordinated effort is to detect and punish shirkers. (Governments keep money rolling into their treasuries by threatening tax dodgers with jail.) However, there is no world government with the power to bring wayward nations into line, no world-ranging whip to keep countries pulling in time.

This is the glaring flaw in plans for carbon taxes and cap-and-trade regimes: The world's wealthy nations may now be willing to paddle their boat upstream, but if the developing world won't row along with them, if they insist on a free ride, the boat is going nowhere.

Yet there are other tricks for encouraging cooperation and weeding out "free-riders." Consider the self-flagellating Shiites and face-piercing Thai vegans. These are extreme examples of a cooperation-enabling strategy that game theorists call "costly signaling." Those who display an unflinching devotion to even the most burdensome rules of common life are more likely to pull their weight, to uphold their end of a deal. Talk is cheap, but the willingness to pay a price signals to others the commitment of a real team player.

President Obama would like to walk into the climate-change talks in Copenhagen this December flashing a clear signal that America is willing to pay a price in the fight against carbon and its depredations. Indeed, the best one can hope from the climate legislation languishing in Congress is that, if passed, it will put the world on notice that the United States, the Earth's greatest per-capita carbon font, can be trusted to pull its weight in a global climate deal.

The signal would certainly be costly. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade scheme passed by the House would reduce GDP growth between .03 percent and .09 percent per year for the next 40 years. That may not sound like much, but annual growth rates, like annual interest rates, are compounding, which means that the cost grows considerably over time. At the conservative .03 percent annual penalty, the CBO estimates the U.S. economy in midcentury will be short more than $300 billion a year compared with a future without Waxman-Markey.

What would Americans get in return? Nothing, nada, zip, zilch—unless most of the world plays along. As the CBO put it: "As long as a significant fraction of the world did not adopt similar policies, some of the reductions in the United States would probably be offset by increases in emissions elsewhere." That is to say, if countries like India and China won't agree to (and, more important, stick with) painful cuts that will slow their steady rise from poverty, American sacrifice will do next to nothing to combat the threat of melting ice caps and a more livable Canada.

Costly signals can make sense if they deliver the benefits of cooperation. Won't proof of our faith help skeptical governments in the developing world see that international cooperation is possible after all? It's unlikely.

The Democrats' cap-and-trade bill is stalled in legislative limbo because Americans are far from united about its merits. It would be reasonable for international players to suspect that an American electorate unhappy with the costs of a future carbon cap might have a change of heart. And then there's the bill itself: a patchwork of exemptions, subsidies, and special favors. If political horse-trading produced something so convoluted from the start, it is fair to assume that it will become even more compromised as time goes on, leaving the U.S. unable to actually meet the legislation's aims. Most important, a costly signal clinches trust only among those on the same wavelength. Overheated ultra-orthodox Jews and lacerated Shiite Muslims probably don't much impress each other. Likewise, the signal broadcast by the willingness of wealthy nations to cut their carbon emissions may fail to impress poorer counties with fundamentally different priorities. They are not free-riding if they never asked to be in the boat.

It is hard to see the point of legislation that promises certain costs and improbable benefits. Still, there could be a point. Many Americans would find profound meaning in passing legislation like Waxman-Markey and gladly bear its costs—even if it does little to secure international cooperation, and even if it does nothing to slow global warming. The law would nevertheless speak to what Americans value, what we aspire to, who we are, what we're about. It would say that we're not so bad, that we repent our industrial sins, that over here we know full well that green is the new black.

Alas, this is not a statement of faith most Americans are prepared to make, or a cost they are prepared to pay. They should not be asked to don a green hair shirt just to show the world that some of us care.

Ethanol is sustainable by definition. The CO₂ sequestered by growing corn is exactly offset by the CO₂ emissions that follow from burning the fuel in a car. The same observation applies to, say, consuming bourbon made from corn, but ethanol can replace energy — bourbon cannot. Hence, any sustainability standard should be applied to all corn and other crop products, and not just ethanol.

Sustainability standards are based on "lifecycle accounting," in which ethanol is assumed to replace gasoline; but in fact, it may be replacing coal or other energy sources. Life-cycle accounting also fails to recognize that if incentives are given for ethanol producers to use relatively "clean" inputs (e.g., natural gas), the "dirtier" inputs (e.g., coal) that might otherwise have been used for the ethanol production will simply be used by other producers to make products that are not covered by the sustainability standard. Sustainability standards reshuffle who is using what inputs — with no net reduction in national emissions.

Finally, sustainability standards are discriminatory under World Trade Organization law and are unlikely to survive a legal challenge from ethanol producers abroad. The United States will not be able to rely on the World Trade Organization's exception for trade laws protecting the environment because of lax U.S. policies dealing with greenhouse gas emissions relative to its trading partners. Moreover, the imposition of U.S. tariffs on more climate-friendly ethanol produced abroad weakens any U.S. defense of ethanol sustainability standards under the WTO.

In just the latest example of government policies working at cross-purposes, the president buys a 60 percent stake in GM at a cost to taxpayers of $50 billion (conservatively), and simultaneously supports a mandate—in the rigid CAFE standard—that will severely handicap GM, while assisting the competition.

C4C gave consumers the opportunity to express their preferences in the high mileage vehicle market, and GM failed miserably. Consumers of high mileage vehicles prefer Toyotas, Hondas, Fords, Nissans and Hyundais, whose offerings comprise the top ten best sellers list under the program. Not a single GM (or Chrysler) product made the top ten under C4C.

GM’s competitive strength is in the luxury car, muscle car, SUV, and pick-up truck categories. But to sell those cars in 2016, GM will need to sell many, many more small cars than it does now to achieve an average fleet fuel efficiency of 35.5 mpg. So, while GM’s competitors are free to target the gas-guzzling market because there is already plenty of demand for their high-mileage vehicles, GM’s capacity to compete where it is strongest will be conditioned on its ability to cultivate an obviously very skeptical market for its small cars. And that bodes very poorly for GM’s future.

For more on GM’s future and the damage done to important U.S. institutions, like private property rights, the rule of law, the free enterprise system, and the proper separation of economy and state as a result of the Bush/Obama auto intervention, you are welcome to join us for a policy forum at Cato on October 15 at noon.

President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.

But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement.

In the book that popularized the phrase “the Imperial Presidency,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. focused overwhelmingly on the vast growth of presidential power in foreign affairs. But as an inveterate New Dealer, Schlesinger had a blind spot where it came to the Emperor’s burgeoning powers at home.

The Supreme Court’s virtual abandonment of the nondelegation doctrine after 1935 paved the way for the modern administrative state, in which Congress all too eagerly cedes legislative power to the executive branch. As the Obama administration’s latest actions on global warming show, the Imperial Presidency comes in green, too. From my column in the Washington Examiner this week:

James Madison believed that there could be “no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person.” And yet, here we are, with those powers united in the person of a president who has pledged to heal the planet and stop the oceans’ rise.

The Times article makes clear that Obama won’t push his authority under the Clean Air Act (or the Supreme Court’s interpretation thereof in Mass. v. EPA) as far as he might, yet: “By raising the standard to 25,000 tons, the new rule exempts millions of smaller sources of carbon dioxide emissions like bakeries, soft drink bottlers, dry cleaners and hospitals.” Instead, the administration plans to use its power under the CAA as a hammer to hold over Congress’s head, pushing it to act on cap and trade.

But eventually, Obama could push that authority even further. According to a comprehensive legal analysis issued by NYU Law School’s Center for Policy Integrity, “if Congress fails to act, President Obama has the power under the Clean Air Act to adopt a cap-and-trade system.” (Emphasis mine). (Note in the link above that Matt Yglesias, dedicated opponent of Bush’s war-on-terror executive power grabs, doesn’t seem exactly upset at the prospect of cap-and-trade via executive fiat.)

True, such a move would be litigated to death, and the forests of paperwork it would generate might result in a carbon footprint larger than whatever it abated. Nonetheless, we ought to be disturbed by the notion that in a democratic country the president could make such a move without an up or down vote from Congress. And, as I suggest in the Examiner piece, it ought to make conservatives question their longtime conviction that presidential control over administrative agencies is a reliable method for decreasing the country’s regulatory burden:

After 9/11, the phrase “unitary executive theory” (UET) came to stand for the idea that the president can do whatever he pleases in the national security arena. But it originally stood for a humbler proposition: UET’s architects in the Reagan administration argued that the Constitution’s grant of executive power to the president meant that he controlled the executive branch, and could therefore rein in aggressive regulatory agencies.

In an era when Republicans held a virtual lock on the Electoral College, that idea had some appeal. But as Elena Kagan, now President Obama’s Solicitor General, pointed out in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, there’s little reason to think that “presidential supervision of administration inherently cuts in a deregulatory direction.”

… [A]s Kagan notes, after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, President Clinton used his regulatory authority unilaterally to show progress, pushing “a distinctly activist and pro-regulatory agenda.” As Obama’s popularity erodes, he may come to like the idea of being the “decider.”

It seems to me that a government truly concerned about global warming–putting aside the merits of that position–would want to encourage the adoption of solar panels, including by keeping them as cheap as possible. Nor, I would have thought, is this the time to add more fuel to the fire that is starting to characterize the U.S. trade relationship with China. There’s plenty enough fuel for that already.

Some people blame the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates low; some blame the Community Reinvestment Act for encouraging lenders to offer loans to marginal homebuyers; others blame Wall Street for failing to properly assess the risks of subprime mortgages. But all of these explanations apply equally nationwide, while a close look reveals that only some communities suffered from housing bubbles.

Between 2000 and the bubble's peak, inflation- adjusted housing prices in California and Florida more than doubled, and since the peak they have fallen by 20 to 30 percent. In contrast, housing prices in Georgia and Texas grew by only about 20 to 25 percent, and they haven't significantly declined.

In other words, California and Florida housing bubbled, but Georgia and Texas housing did not. This is hardly because people don't want to live in Georgia and Texas: since 2000, Atlanta, Dallas–Ft. Worth, and Houston have been the nation's fastest-growing urban areas, each growing by more than 120,000 people per year.

This suggests that local factors, not national policies, were a necessary condition for the housing bubbles where they took place. The most important factor that distinguishes states like California and Florida from states like Georgia and Texas is the amount of regulation imposed on landowners and developers, and in particular a regulatory system known as growth management.

In short, restrictive growth management was a necessary condition for the housing bubble. States that use some form of growth management should repeal laws that mandate or allow such planning, and other states and urban areas should avoid passing such laws or implementing such plans; otherwise, the next housing bubble could be even more devastating than this one.

I’m under no illusion that this development had anything to do with my recommendations, but it seems that the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are attempting a trade deal amongst themselves and China to expedite tariff reductions in “climate friendly” goods (more here).  Apparently it is designed to be an incentive to get Beijing on board for a global climate deal, but of course American consumers and businesses would gain from cheaper and better access to green technology, too.

I would, of course, prefer that U.S. lawmakers see the value in reducing tariffs on all goods without waiting for the other OECD members to catch on, but surely this development is better than the alternative.

The Obama team appears to believe it has the authority to implement comprehensive climate change regulation, Congress be damned. Worse still, under current constitutional law--which has little to do with the actual Constitution--they're probably right.

In a democratic country, you'd think that before the executive branch could regulate CO2--a ubiquitous substance essential to life--the legislature would have to vote on the issue. But you'd be wrong.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1970 Clean Air Act's definition of air pollutant was broad enough to allow regulation of CO2 emissions from new cars, and that the EPA was required to regulate once it issued a finding that CO2 contributes to global warming. In fact, once the EPA rules that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant--as it did in April--regulation of industrial sources likely becomes mandatory as well.

But existing law still leaves the executive branch enormous discretionary power--and thus a hammer to hold over Congress's head. A report issued in April by the New York University Law School argues that "if Congress fails to act, President Obama has the power under the Clean Air Act to adopt a cap-and-trade system."

James Madison believed that there could be "no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person." And yet, here we are, with those powers united in the person of a president who has pledged to heal the planet and stop the oceans' rise.

This constitutional nightmare is the culmination of a trend many years in the making. The first sentence of the Constitution's first article says that "all legislative Powers herein granted" are vested in Congress.

The Supreme Court once took that language seriously, as when, in 1935, it struck down a key New Deal program for delegating legislative power to the executive. Yet the Court eventually made its peace with statutes that allow the executive branch to both make and enforce the law.

That paved the way for the modern administrative state, which looks a lot like the situation complained of in the Declaration of Independence, in which "a multitude of New Offices... harass our people and eat out their substance."

After 9/11, the phrase "unitary executive theory" (UET) came to stand for the idea that the president can do whatever he pleases in the national security arena. But it originally stood for a humbler proposition: UET's architects in the Reagan administration argued that the Constitution's grant of executive power to the president meant that he controlled the executive branch, and could therefore rein in aggressive regulatory agencies.

In an era when Republicans held a virtual lock on the Electoral College, that idea had some appeal. But as Elena Kagan, now President Obama's Solicitor General, pointed out in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, there's little reason to think that "presidential supervision of administration inherently cuts in a deregulatory direction."

How far will Obama push in the other direction? He may be reluctant to stretch his authority as far as the law will allow, in a political climate where even green-leaning Democrats scream bloody murder every time gas prices rise.

But as Kagan notes, after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, President Clinton used his regulatory authority unilaterally to show progress, pushing "a distinctly activist and pro-regulatory agenda." As Obama's popularity erodes, he may come to like the idea of being the "decider."

Will liberals who decried George W. Bush's unilateralism object to this staggering concentration of executive power? Don't hold your breath.

In Paul Krugman’s most recent column, he makes a similar claim about reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

The evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Both claims of a “free lunch” are heroic, at best.

In the case of health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid are inefficient, but to make them more efficient we have to reduce government subsidy for health insurance, not expand it.

In the case of energy efficiency, more energy-efficient practices exist (e.g., replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs), but they are expensive: if they actually made consumers richer, most would be using them already.

Now the fact that expanded government health insurance and increased energy efficiency would cost more, not less, does not prove they are bad ideas (that’s a separate discussion). But it means society must evaluate a tradeoff, not just assert we can have something for nothing.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."

Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to "try and find something wrong." The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It's worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about "data storage" is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-track tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world's surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones's note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can't be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

But even though it's now clear the bill is not getting out of Congress, look for the Obama Administration to saddle our economy with this huge new energy tax through other means.

First, a brief flashback: The blowback against Obamunism began over global warming, not health care. By a squeaky 219-212 vote, the House rushed the 1,300-page cap-and-trade opus out the door so the members could get back to the hustings for the Fourth of July. When many freshman Democrats got home, those who voted for it experienced the first angry town halls of their careers. In our minds, it is easy to remember that the rancorous public meetings that continued in the August recess were always about health care, but they weren't.

So, given that health care is now effectively bottled up in both chambers of Congress, why isn't Obama pushing cap-and-trade in the Senate? Simple: the votes aren't there for it. Blanche Lincoln, the new head of the Agriculture Committee, calls cap-and-trade a "complete non starter" and said that it is not her "preference to move on cap and trade this year." Majority Leader Harry Reid recently signaled his agreement by stating that cap-and-trade "may" not be considered until next year.

For cap-and-trade, "next year" translates as "never." Senators know what touched off the town halls, and they know what fate awaits many of their Democratic colleagues come November 2010. Passing an unpopular health care "public option" along with cap-and-trade will easily realign the Senate into its old filibustering self. That kills cap-and-trade in the next Congress.

But do not despair, fans of economy-killing regulation.

Thanks to the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the EPA has authority to issue its own regulations on carbon dioxide. So while asking legislators to swallow hard on the bitter gristle of cap-and-trade, the president has really had the power to enact its core components on his own all along. Small wonder lawmakers of his own party are more than willing to toss the issue back onto his plate.

Now that cap-and-trade has so spectacularly failed in the legislature, it is a sure bet that Obama will direct (or has directed) EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to issue her own cap-and-trade protocols. Look for something concrete out of EPA before the U.N.'s climate change confab in Copenhagen in early December. (That "something" may even include a new fuel economy standard of 35.5 miles-per-gallon—though it would be lower, of course, for the inefficient cars produced by government-owned General Motors.)

The timing of the Copenhagen conference is really what has been driving Obama's support for cap-and-trade all along. It would be an embarrassment for a left-hewing "green" president to show up empty-handed at such an event—and it will greatly diminish Obama's ability to wag his finger at other industrialized countries. For sure, the world's largest emitter of CO2—China—isn't going to agree to any mandatory emissions reductions unless the U.S. has something very serious in hand. And if China does nothing, there's simply not going to be a major slowdown in the growth of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Not that it really matters. The rather large elephants crowding cap-and-trade out of the Senate is the earth's reluctance to warm in the last decade along with new projections saying that we could go another ten years without much warming.

The current hiatus in warming portends a reduction in potential heating for the entire century. Most computer models produce significant warming as a result of an increase in atmospheric water vapor (a "greenhouse" gas), which comes from an ocean initially warmed by carbon dioxide. When the ocean doesn't warm much, this "feedback" effect is delayed. Or so goes the myth.

The lack of warming is an embarrassment to any elected official who has been hiding behind "the science is settled" fig leaf in order to promote cap-and-trade. While every scientist will tell you that indeed the surface temperature of the planet is warmer than it was a century ago (that's the "settled" part of global warming science), very few scientists anticipated as long a period without warming as we are in. In other words, the real science of future warming is completely unsettled.

The bottom line is that Senate Democrats are perfectly happy to kick cap-and-trade under the bus. They're going to have a hard enough time recovering from the upcoming health care wreck. But the economy, meanwhile, will have an equally hard time recovering from what President Obama is going to do instead.

Many modern Republicans claim devotion to Ronald Reagan’s ideas, but they often seem to forget about the “minimum of government” thing. The following points are from Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s “More Energy, More Jobs” plan:

• “McDonnell was the chief sponsor of legislation creating the Virginia Hydrogen Energy Plan.”
• “McDonnell also supported grant programs for solar photovoltaic manufacturing, tax exemptions for solar energy and recycling property, and tax credits for solar energy equipment.”
• “In order to protect Virginia’s citizens from the skyrocketing wholesale prices of electricity seen in other states, McDonnell brought together all the necessary stake holders to re-regulate electricity in Virginia.”
• “Currently, Virginia is the second largest importer of electricity behind California.  This is unacceptable.”
• “Bob McDonnell will establish Virginia as a Green Jobs Zone to incentivize companies to create quality green jobs. Qualified businesses would be eligible to receive an income tax credit equal to $500 per position created per year for the first five years.”
• “The Virginia Alternative Fuels Revolving Fund was established to assist local governments that convert to alternative fuel systems . . . Bob McDonnell will expand the purpose of this fund to include infrastructure such as refueling stations, provide seed money and aggressively pursue additional grants.”
• “Bob McDonnell will make Southwest and Southside Virginia the nation’s hub for traditional and alternative energy research and development…To assist with the attraction, building and operation of major energy facilities in Southside and Southwest Virginia, we will also support the establishment of the Center for Energy.”
• “To help Virginia universities gain access to federal stimulus money, as Governor, Bob McDonnell will establish the Virginia Universities Clean Energy Development and Economic Stimulus Foundation.”
• “As Governor, Bob McDonnell will leverage stimulus funding to incentivize individuals and businesses to conduct energy audits and encourage public private partnerships between small businesses and government.”

It’s true that McDonnell’s plan has some free market elements, and also that Ronald Reagan supported some wasteful energy boondoggles. However, the degree to which the modern Republican wants to micromanage and manipulate the energy industry is remarkable. McDonnell is almost setting out a Soviet five-year plan for a substantial part of the Virginia economy. For goodness sakes, he wants to treat Virginia like a separate country and try to fix the supposed problem that it is “importing” too much energy from other states!

It’s not just energy. Look at the top-down central planning ideas that McDonnell has for “creating jobs”:

• “Expanding use of the Governor’s Opportunity Fund by roughly doubling the funding available and broadening Fund rules to allow companies that generate additional state and local tax revenue to qualify.”
• “Appointing Lieutenant Governor Bolling to serve as “Virginia’s Chief Job Creation Officer” in the McDonnell/Bolling Administration.”
• “Designating one Deputy Secretary of Commerce to Focus Solely on Rural Economic Development.”
• “Providing a $1,000 tax credit per job to businesses that create 50 new jobs, or 25 new jobs in economically distressed areas.”
• “Double the funding for the Virginia Tourism Corporation. Currently Virginia trails 14 states including West Virginia and Tennessee in tourism funding.”
• “Increase funding for the Governor’s Motion Picture Fund by $2 million.”
• “Providing a $1,000 tax credit per job to businesses that create 50 new jobs, or 25 new jobs in economically distressed areas.”

Again, McDonnell mixes some pro-market proposals in with these Big Government interventions. And his opponent, Creigh Deeds, is promoting his own interventionist schemes, many very similar to McDonnell’s.

In 1980, the difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan on economic policy was clear. But today, we seem to have arrived at a point where it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference in economic platforms between a self-proclaimed conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat.

As the mission became muddied, each surface transportation reauthorization since 1982 has included an increasing number of earmarks, divided revenues among more and more different funds, and added lengthy rules for how those funds may be spent. Each earmark, apportionment, and rule has made transportation spending incrementally less efficient.

This increasing politicization of something that began life as a fairly efficient program is the predictable result of government involvement in what is essentially a private economic activity. The inevitability of such decline is a good argument for abolishing the U.S. Department of Transportation and devolving federal transportation programs to the states.

Short of that, Congress should make every effort to return to a system where people get what they pay for — that is, transportation user fees are dedicated to systems that benefit the people who paid those fees — and people pay for what they get — that is, people pay the full cost of the facilities they use.

As a second-best solution to abolishing the Department of Transportation, this paper offers eight proposals essential for the 2009 reauthorization to achieve these goals. These proposals include

1. Apportion funds to states based on population,
land area, and user fees
2. Require that short-term plans be efficient
or cost efficient
3. Create a citizen-enforcement process that
will ensure efficiency and cost efficiency
4. Eliminate long-range transportation planning
5. Allow unlimited use of road tolls
6. Eliminate clean-air mandates
7. Avoid earmarks
8. Remove employee protective arrangements from transit law