Special Interests are Again Pushing for Biofuel Subsidies

New legislation to benefit biofuel production may soon be forthcoming, according to recent reporting by Reuters.

One proposal would use federal dollars to build new high-blend ethanol fuel pumps while another would provide tax credits for more biofuel-friendly vehicles. These policies would be harmful to consumers and prop up an uneconomic industry.

Farm-belt Senators including Sen. Amy Klobuchar D-MN, Rep. Cheri Bustos R-IL, and Rep. Cindy Axne D-IA are leading the biofuels push, according to Reuters sources. This should come as no surprise, as the biofuel discussion has long been backed by members of Congress from highly agricultural districts.

The two proposals to benefit biofuel producers will be introduced by farm-state representatives in the near future. There is also a possibility that these bills will be rolled into a large spending bill in the fall containing all of the Biden priorities that don’t make it into the final version of the infrastructure bill.

Under the first proposal, $2 billion would be spent subsidizing the construction of new focused infrastructure, including gas pumps that use higher biofuel blends. The money would be spent through a 5 cent-per-gallon tax credit which would be available to gas stations that offer E15, a 15 percent ethanol fuel blend. The other proposal is a tax credit for manufacturers of “flex-fuel” vehicles, which run on a wider range of gasoline/ethanol mixtures than other vehicles. The credit would be for $200.

Both of these proposals would be an attempt by the government to increase the usage of an unpopular and uneconomical fuel source. Despite decades of government subsidies and requirements, it has failed to gain mainstream momentum on its own. Ethanol and other biofuels consume massive amounts of land, put upward pressure on global food prices, and, depending on the way they are produced, biofuels can create similar or even more emissions than their fossil fuel counterparts. It’s all well and good if consumers would prefer to use ethanol in their vehicles, but as the market has continually shown, this is not the case.

There could not be a worse time to push for more ethanol usage, as both the U.S. and Brazil—the world’s largest users of ethanol—are scaling back production due to the rising demand and price of the corn and sugarcane necessary to manufacture biofuel. This demand shift towards using the inputs as food shows that they’re more necessary there than as ethanol, and a subsidy only obfuscates that price signal. It would be illogical to subsidize the increased use of ethanol at the expense of a higher-order market preference for the allocation of its inputs.

Additionally, biofuel subsidies have been taken up by both the Senate and the Biden Administration. President Biden’s budget proposal for the fiscal year 2022 includes hefty subsidies for aviation biofuels. The sustainable aviation fuel tax incentives would cost more than $6.6 billion between 2022-2031. The Clean Energy for America Act, which was recently passed out of the Senate Finance Committee and is awaiting consideration by the full Senate, contained an amendment that added biofuels onto the list of energy tax credits that would be extended by the bill.

In their analysis of both proposals, Taxpayers for Common Sense provided a cost-per-gallon breakdown of what these proposals would mean for taxpayers.

“Continuing to subsidize biofuels—whether for ethanol blender pumps or aviation fuel—will lead to sky-high taxpayer costs. With a sustainable aviation fuel credit of up to $2 per gallon, as passed out of the Senate Finance Committee, or up to $1.75 per gallon in the President’s budget request, taxpayers would be on the hook for subsidies twice as expensive (per gallon anyway) as of current law.”

In a country with more than $28 trillion in national debt, the subsidization of inferior fuel products serves special interests in the farm belt without providing the substantial environmental benefit is folly.

Although Ethanol and other biofuels may burn slightly cleaner than other fuels, they have serious problems as well, including land use, fertilizer requirements, and the energy requirements of growing its feedstock. Hopefully, none of these ill-considered biofuel proposals are eventually adopted, either stand-alone legislation or as part of a larger action.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/22/biofuel-subsidies-biofuels/

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The Legal Doctrine of “Carbon Crimes”—Torturing Law and Reason to Rid the Planet of Climate-Change Deniers

The climate movement has discovered criminal law as a tool for conducting climate politics. To complement civil lawsuits against states and corporations, the movement’s activists intend to invoke torture and a newly proposed crime of “ecocide” to target corporate executives, politicians, and others who stand in the way of their preferred policies. In pushing their agenda, these activists receive assistance from the judiciary—specifically, the European Court of Human Rights.

The use of criminal law to pursue climate politics is a further step in the radicalization of the climate movement and poses a threat to economic and political freedoms, the rule of law, and democracy. If the movement is able to realize its plans, all those who do not support ambitious climate policies would have to fear prosecution and imprisonment. Conversely, threatening criminal sanctions against politicians and corporate executives will create powerful incentives to adopt ambitious climate policies and the dominant pro-climate narrative.

Lucas Bergkamp explains how criminal law, in the climate movement’s vision, should supplement civil and administrative law to eliminate any and all opposition to its plans for the realization of a climate utopia.

European government of judges

Over several decades, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has evolved into a European government in itself. Based on doctrines designed to enable it to expand its powers at its discretion, the Court has enacted a series of mandates for new laws and policies for Europe. There is little democratic control over the Court’s role in advancing progressive politics. Once the Court has spoken, national parliaments are unable to undo its pontification because a human right trumps national law; national judiciaries are compelled to execute the Court’s judgments, even if their own national law provides otherwise.

While imposing its high moral demands on executive governments, the Court believes itself to be quite exempt from any moral or legal constraints. In a previous contribution, I discussed how climate-change litigation before the Court has undermined the rule of law, the separation of powers, and democracy. In this article, I focus on the Court’s role in criminalizing the climate debate. Its reckless disregard of judicial impartiality, the right to a fair trial, and judicial restraint is another manifestation of the Court’s support for the progressive movement.

Criminalizing “climate denial”
A decade ago, an American lawyer argued that climate denial is arguably punishable as criminal deception and fraud under existing law. In 2015, Al Gore said that “climate-change deniers should be punished.” President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement was viewed as a crime against humanity: “This is murder.”

A recent book, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes, describes “what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming.” On UNESCO’s website, a prominent feature article advocates that “climate crimes must be brought to justice” and that “states and corporations must be held accountable for their actions or inaction regarding climate change.”

The rationale supporting criminalization

The argument for criminalizing “climate denial” typically boils down to the following argument articulated by Jeremy Williams:

Given what we know and have known for decades about climate change, to deny the science, deceive the public, and willfully obstruct any serious response to the climate catastrophe is to allow entire countries and cultures to disappear. It is to rob … the poorest and most vulnerable on the planet of their land, their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives—and their children’s lives, and their children’s children’s lives. For profit. And for , power…. These are crimes. They are crimes against the earth, and they are crimes against humanity.

This emotional outcry is not only an impenetrable amalgamation of factual and moral reasoning but also assumes what must be proved. To prevent disaster, rationality needs to be brought back into the analysis. Unfortunately, as the ECHR demonstrates, we cannot rely on the judiciary to do so.

The “European Climate-Change Court”

In 2020, the ECHR signaled to the human rights community that it was open to receiving applications from climate activists. The Court and the Council of Europe held a conference, “Human Rights for the Planet,” in which several judges, including the Court’s president, played key roles. The speeches delivered by the Court’s judges were rightly perceived as an open invitation to activists.

Several climate cases are now pending before the Court. As expected, climate-emergency rhetoric dominates the arguments presented by the plaintiffs. The Court has already demonstrated how far it is willing to go to rewrite the law to save the planet.

“Climate emergency”

The European Court of Human Rights, to which its president refers as the “European Climate Change Court,” has used the opportunity presented by the climate litigation that it invited to take the lead in criminalizing the climate debate. It has done so in a number of ways. First, the Court’s president and one of its vice presidents have declared publicly that “we are facing a dire emergency that requires concerted action by all of humanity” and that “we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security.” Thus, the Court’s leaders have openly and unreservedly endorsed the climate movement’s alarmist rhetoric. They have done so not based on science but on alarmist declarations by Sir David Attenborough, a well-known biologist and climate activist.

Second, to prevent any argument on the facts, the judges added: “No one can legitimately call into question that we are facing a dire emergency that requires concerted action by all of humanity.” They also committed the Court to the cause: “For its part, the European Court of Human Rights will play its role within the boundaries of its competences as a court of law, forever mindful that Convention guarantees must be effective and real, not illusory.”

No right to a fair trial for deniers

By issuing these warnings, the Court effectively closed down any debate on climate change and climate science before any trial has even begun. In doing so, it deprived defendant states of an important argument to defend themselves against allegations that their climate policies are inadequate to fight the alleged climate crisis. Before they could present the relevant scientific evidence showing that there is no such thing as climate emergency or climate crisis, the Court’s leading judges told the defendant states that they should not dare to deny.

By labeling any argument that there is no climate crisis “illegitimate,” these leading European judges, who should serve as examples of judicial impartiality, have endorsed the climate movement’s climate-denier rhetoric. This rhetoric is an inappropriate, unethical play on Holocaust denial. Simultaneously, and directly relevant to this contribution’s subject, the Court’s “illegitimacy” label also raises the specter of criminal prosecution.

There is no climate crisis

It is hard to think of any judicial conduct that shows greater partisanship and disregard for the principle of judicial impartiality than the conduct of these European human rights judges. The right to a fair trial, guaranteed by article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, has effectively been set aside for climate deniers. The question should be asked whether, given the opinions expressed by its leaders, the ECHR can legitimately rule in any climate case.

The Court’s denial of justice is all the more shocking in light of the science, which does not support the proposition that there is a climate crisis. The European Commission has stated: “The term ‘climate emergency’ expresses the political will to fulfil the obligations under the Paris Agreement.” In almost 4,000 pages, the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report does not once employ the terms “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” because these terms do not belong to the scientific terminology (they occur only in a descriptive section on communication). Rather, they are political slogans, as the Commission suggested. To the point, the undefined “climate emergency” is an invention by activists.

Torture

Remarkably, even the finger-pointing at perceived climate denial was not sufficient for the ECHR. In the first climate case pending before it, the Court decided, on its own volition, to add “torture” to the charges against 33 states that allegedly do not do enough to combat climate change, as required by the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The Court suggests that these states may have committed “torture” by adopting “inadequate climate policies.”

Torture, of course, is a serious crime. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) provides that torture, “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack,” is a crime against humanity. Consequently, not implementing adequate climate policy would be a crime against humanity that can be prosecuted by the ICC. What would the victims of actual torture think of the Court’s misuse of this term for political reasons?

Judicial threats

Corporate executives of companies deemed to be responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, politicians that do not support ambitious climate policies, and everyone else who advocates against the climate movement’s agenda would be exposed to criminal prosecution and imprisonment of up to 30 years. This is not a far-fetched interpretation of the relevant law but, as explained below, a fairly straightforward application. Obviously, the ECHR was well aware of what it was doing by slipping in “torture,” but it nevertheless felt comfortable proceeding in this manner.

Needless to say, the threat of life imprisonment is a very powerful disincentive. As an academic author for UNESCO put it:

Criminal sanctions are the most potent tools we have to mark out conduct that lies beyond all limits of toleration. Criminal conduct violates basic rights and destroys human security. We reserve the hard treatment of punishment for conduct that damages the things we hold most fundamentally valuable. Climate change is causing precisely such damage.

This seems to be exactly what the judges on the ECHR believe. Corporate executives will have to think twice about corporate climate policies and will be inclined to cave in to activists’ demands. Likewise, politicians skeptical of the current climate policies may feel compelled to give up their resistance. All other dissenters may also be inclined to choose personal security over honesty. Economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech would be obliterated. Is this what the Court’s president means when he says that the European Convention guarantees must be “effective and real, not illusory”? The Court’s inexplicable decision to add torture to the charges in the first climate case only adds to the concern that human rights protect only those who endorse progressive causes, not those who have other political preferences.

Ecocide

By invoking the crime of torture in the climate debate, the ECHR may also have intended to assist the efforts to get ecocide recognized as a crime. “Ecocide” refers to the “devastation and destruction of the environment,” but no official legal definition yet exists. For decades, greens have been trying to get ecocide recognized as an international crime—but so far, to no avail. In the last two years, however, due to the rise of the climate-crisis narrative, they have made significant progress. There now is much activity aimed at persuading international organizations to legislate on ecocide.

In May 2021, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), a global organization that claims to empower national parliamentarians to promote, inter alia, sustainable development, adopted a resolution calling on all “[m]ember Parliaments to reinforce criminal law to prevent and punish widespread, long-term and severe damage to the environment” and “to examine the possibility of recognizing the crime of ecocide to prevent the threats and conflicts resulting from climate-related disasters and their consequences”

In June 2021, an expert panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation published a definition of “ecocide” intended to serve as the basis for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the ICC. Once the Rome Statute is amended to include ecocide, individuals suspected of having committed ecocide can be tried before the ICC.

The amendment’s breadth

With this amendment, the prohibition of climate denial becomes redundant because the Rome Statute threatens imprisonment against not only those who commit a crime but also anyone who “induces the commission of such a crime,” “aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission,” or “in any other way contributes to the commission or attempted commission of such a crime by a group of persons.” Moreover, the Rome Statute applies equally to all persons, without any distinction based on official capacity; specifically, elected representatives and government officials are not exempt from criminal responsibility.

Thus, politicians, corporate executives, thought leaders, and anyone else can be subject to criminal prosecution if they express an opinion or pursue a policy deemed to be “anti-climate” that therefore may result in ecocide. In the fight against climate denial, this tool would be of incalculable value.

European Union “leadership”

The European Parliament has referred to ecocide in two recent reports and expressed the wish to recognize ecocide under EU law and diplomacy. To prepare the adoption of an EU directive on ecocide, the European Law Institute launched a project on ecocide. Taking advantage of the momentum, even before this project is finished, the ecocide movement is now pushing to get ecocide included in the EU Environmental Crimes Directive, which is currently being revised.

EU member states control a significant portion of the votes necessary for an amendment of the Rome Statute and can provide incentives to secure the additional votes necessary to get the crime of ecocide adopted. The consequences of such an amendment could be enormous if the ICC follows the example of the ECHR and jumps onto the climate activists’ bandwagon.

Climate change is ecocide

Make no mistake: while the definition of ecocide is broad and vague, the primary target of the ecocide movement is climate change. Civil liability law and human rights law give climate activists the tools to force governments and companies to comply with their demands, but this kind of litigation is expensive and takes time. The new crime of ecocide would give them a powerful instrument to shortcut the process by threatening criminal sanctions against corporate directors and officers, as well as reluctant politicians and opinion leaders, and to force them to change their ways.

Climate activists also believe that the term “ecocide” will have an emotive and stigmatizing effect that “causing climate change” does not have. As one author puts it:

The term “ecocide” sounds dramatic. It is more emotive than “contributing to pollution” or “increasing greenhouse gas emissions” or “investing in fossil fuels.” It communicates the gravity and urgency of the irreversible destruction being inflicted on the environment. It unambiguously casts major polluters as “villains,” perpetrators of a crime (emphasis added).

No protection

National laws do not protect the suspects. Under the proposed definition of the international panel, ecocide means “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” Note that “unlawful,” which is broader than “illegal,” is the gateway to disregarding permits for emissions and compliance of activities and products with national laws.

The main trick is that this definition does not require any actual damage; knowledge of likely damage in the future is enough—which is a given, in light of the “settled science” set forth in the IPCC reports. Fundamental principles of criminal law are merely an afterthought, if they are on the radar screen at all.

https://clintel.org/the-legal-doctrine-of-carbon-crimes-torturing-law-and-reason-to-rid-the-planet-of-climate-change-deniers/

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Root of UK energy crisis is climate policy’

Had it not been so exceptionally calm in the run up to this autumn equinox, one could call the energy crisis a perfect storm. Wind farms stand idle for days on end, a fire interrupts a vital cable from France, a combination of post-Covid economic recovery and Russia tightening supply means the gas price has shot through the roof – and so the market price of both home heating and electricity is rocketing.

But the root of the crisis lies in the monomaniacal way in which this government and its recent predecessors have pursued decarbonisation at the expense of other priorities including reliability and affordability of energy.

It is almost tragi-comic that this crisis is happening while Boris Johnson is in New York, futilely trying to persuade an incredulous world to join us in committing eco self-harm by adopting a rigid policy of net zero by 2050 – a target that is almost certainly not achievable without deeply hurting the British economy and the lives of ordinary people, and which will only make the slightest difference to the climate anyway, given that the UK produces a meagre 1 per cent of global emissions.

As for the middle-class Extinction Rebellion poseurs and their road-closing chums from Insult Britain, sorry Insulate Britain, they are basing their apocalyptic predictions of ‘catastrophe’ and billions of deaths on gross exaggerations.

And while preventing working people earning a livelihood may make them feel good, it does nothing to solve the real problem of climate change.

Yet this crisis is a mere harbinger of the candle-lit future that awaits us if we do not change course.

It comes upon us when we have barely started ripping out our gas boilers to make way for the expensive and inefficient heat pumps the Government is telling us to buy, or building the costly new power stations that will be needed to charge the electric cars we will all soon require.

When David Cameron’s energy bill was being discussed in Parliament in 2013, the word on everybody’s lips was ‘trilemma’: how to ensure that energy was affordable, reliable and low-carbon. Everybody knew then that renewables were unreliable: that wind power fully works less than one-third of the time, and that solar power is unavailable at night (of course) and less efficient on cloudy winter days.

Yet whenever we troublemakers raised this issue, we were told not to worry – it would resolve itself, they said, either because wind is usually blowing somewhere, or through the development of electricity storage in giant battery farms.

This was plain wrong. The task of balancing the grid and maintaining electrical frequency has grown dangerously the more reliant on wind power we have become – as demonstrated by the widespread power cuts of August 2019. The cost of grid management has soared to nearly £2billion a year in the last two decades.

As for the middle-class Extinction Rebellion poseurs and their road-closing chums from Insult Britain, sorry Insulate Britain, they are basing their apocalyptic predictions of ‘catastrophe’ and billions of deaths on gross exaggerations

Wind can indeed be light everywhere and the grid still needs vast extra investment to transfer wind power from northern Scotland to southern England. One of the cables built at huge expense to do just that has failed multiple times and Scottish wind farms are frequently paid extra to switch off because there’s not enough capacity in the cables.

As for batteries,it would take billions of pounds to build ones that could keep the lights on for a few hours let alone a week.

So the only way to make renewables reliable is to back them up, expensively, with some other power source, responding to fluctuations in demand and supply.

Nuclear is no good at that: its operations are slow to start and stop. So, ironically, renewables have only hastened the decline of nuclear power, their even lower-carbon rival (remember it takes 150 tonnes of coal to make a wind turbine).

And in any case, an inflexible approach to regulation has caused the cost of new nuclear to balloon – despite it being perhaps the most obvious solution to our long-term energy needs.

Coal – the cheapest option and the only energy source with low-cost storage in the shape of a big heap of the stuff – was ruled out as too carbon-rich, even though countries such as China are currently building scores of new coal-fired plants.

Unlike those countries, the UK Government has rushed to close its remaining coal power stations – and banned the opening of a opencast coalmine at Highthorn on the Northumberland coast last year, despite it winning the support of the county council, the planning inspector and the courts when the Government appealed.

Ministers decided they would rather throw hundreds of Northern workers out of a job, turn down hundreds of millions of pounds of investment and rely instead – for the five million tonnes of coal per year gap that we still need for industry – on energy imports from those famously reliable partners, Russia and Venezuela.

To add insult to injury, the Government has been handing out hefty subsidies to a coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, Drax, to burn wood instead of coal, imported from American forests, even though burning wood generates more emissions than coal per unit of electricity generated.

The excuse is that trees regrow, so it’s ‘renewable’, which makes zero sense then you think it through (trees take decades to grow – and then we cut them down again anyway).

So that leaves gas with the task of keeping the lights on.

Coal – the cheapest option and the only energy source with low-cost storage in the shape of a big heap of the stuff – was ruled out as too carbon-rich, even though countries such as China are currently building scores of new coal-fired plants

Gas turbines are fairly flexible to switch on and off as wind varies, they’re relatively cheap, highly efficient and much lower in emissions than wood, coal or oil.

But until 2009, the conventional wisdom was that gas was going to run out soon.

Then came the shale gas revolution, pioneered in Texas. A flash in the pan, I was told by energy experts in this country: and ‘could never happen here anyway’. So Britain – whose North Sea gas was running out – watched on in snobbish disdain as America shot back up to become the world’s largest gas producer, with their gas prices one-quarter of ours, resulting in a gold-rush of industry and collapsing emissions as a result of a vast, home-grown supply of reliable, low-carbon energy.

We, meanwhile, decided to kowtow to organisations like Friends of the Earth, which despite being told by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw misleading claims about the extraction of shale gas, embarked on a campaign of misinformation, demanding ever more regulatory hurdles from an all-too-willing civil service.

Nobody was more delighted than Vladimir Putin, who poured scorn on shale gas in interviews, and poured money into western environmentalists’ campaigns against it. The secretary general of Nato confirmed that Russia ‘engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas’.

By 2019, shale gas exploration in Britain was effectively dead, despite one of the biggest discoveries of gas-rich rocks yet found: the Bowland shale, a mile beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Just imagine if we had stood up to the eco-bullies over shale gas. Northern England would now be as brimming with home-grown gas as parts of Pennsylvania and Texas. We would have lower energy prices than Europe, not higher, a rush of manufacturing jobs in areas such as Teesside and Cheshire, rocketing wealth, healthy export earnings, no reliance on Russian whims (they control the reliability of supply and the price we pay for imported electricity, as we are experiencing right now) – and no fear of the lights going out.

But in lieu of that, we could at least invest in gas-storage facilities, to cushion against the Moscow threat and any potential disruptions to supply.

But no, we chose to close the biggest of them, Rough, off East Yorkshire, in 2017 and run down our gas storage to just under 2 per cent of annual demand, far lower than Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands.

Why? Presumably because the only forms of energy that ministers and civil servants respect are wind and solar. Gas is so last-century, you know!

Yet your electricity bill is loaded with ‘green levies’ that in part go to reward the crony capitalists who operate wind farms to the tune of around £10billion a year and rising.

Because energy is a bigger part of the household budget of poorer people than richer people, this is a regressive tax.

Because of the price cap on domestic bills, these levies hit industrial users even harder than domestic, and thus put up the prices of products in shops and deter investment in jobs too.

In the past, coal gave Britain an affordable supply of electricity that was also reliable so long as the miners’ union allowed it to be.

The market mechanisms introduced by Nigel Lawson in the 1980s gave us greater efficiency, the dash for gas, cheaper electricity, a highly reliable supply and falling emissions.

The central planning of the 2010s has given us among the most expensive energy on the planet, futile price caps, bankrupt energy suppliers, import dependence, rising worries about the reliability of supply and – because of the fading influence of nuclear power – not much prospect of further falls in emissions.

So, it’s time to tear up the failed policies of today. What would I do? Take a leaf out of Canada’s book and reform the regulation of nuclear power so that it favours newer, cheaper and even safer designs built in modular form on production lines rather than huge behemoths built like Egyptian pyramids by Chinese investors.

Look to America’s example and restart the shale gas industry fast. Do everything to encourage fusion, the almost infinitely productive technology that looks ready to go by 2040. And call the bluff of the inefficient wind and solar industries by ceasing to subsidise them.

Energy is not just another product: it’s what makes civilisation possible.

https://clintel.org/root-of-energy-crisis-is-climate-policy/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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