How Ed Miliband’s Net Zero Fantasy Is Deforesting North Carolina

From The Daily Sceptic. Excerpt:

"As everyone must now know, it doesn’t matter where the energy comes from in the great rush to Net Zero, only that the source must preferably be invisible to British consumers and voters. It seems that hundreds of acres of forest are being torn down in North Carolina to produce wood-pellets that are then poured into the gaping hungry furnaces of the UK’s Drax power station. 

The Mail has the story:

Some 280 acres of once pristine and ecologically-important wetland forest – a mix of oak, maple, hickory, cypress and pine – have disappeared, torn out as if by a marauding monster. All that’s left is a bleak expanse of boggy pools of water and pulverised pieces of wood.

It’s eerily reminiscent of photographs of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme – only with the addition of several large piles of logs that the men who harvested the lumber from this remote north-eastern corner of North Carolina in November 2023 couldn’t even be bothered to take with them and left to rot.

According to scientists and environmentalists, the idea that new trees will replace the old ones felled any time soon is a load of nonsense:

They point out that burning wood is even dirtier in terms of carbon dioxide than coal and, more important, that it takes decades – 60 or 70 years in the case of hardwood forests – for a new tree to absorb the CO₂ lost by burning the old one. 

That’s precious time, they say, that a warming planet simply doesn’t have, and hardly anyone’s idea of ‘sustainable’ energy.

However, that hasn’t stopped successive UK governments, the world’s most enthusiastic convert to the wonders of wood pellets, from giving billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies to biomass operators.

Needless to say, the heroic leader of the vanguard to turn Britain into a Net Zero paradise of impoverished and frozen people is out in front to help drive this ultimate example of greenwashing:

This week, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband became the latest politician to keep this astonishing arrangement – described by opponents as Britain’s “biggest green hoax” – on the road when he approved a new funding arrangement giving the vast Drax power station in North Yorkshire (the country’s largest) around £2 billion over four years to keep burning biomass.

Miliband, the architect of the Government’s drive to Net Zero, has been implicated in the Drax scandal since 2008 when he was appointed Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. 

Although the new deal cuts Drax’s subsidies in half, given all the Starmer Government has promised about tackling global warming, environmentalists had been hoping for Drax to lose all its subsidy.

Drax, which ironically shares its name with a James Bond villain who set out to destroy the planet, burns the equivalent of 27 million trees every year and – because wood is much dirtier even than coal – is Britain’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, last year producing nearly 12 million tons of the planet-warming gas."

Trump’s Executive-Power Restoration

His bold order putting ‘independent agencies’ under White House control echoes the Founders

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The federal government includes dozens of agencies that are nominally independent of the President even though they enforce laws and exercise other executive power. This wasn’t part of the original constitutional design.

Such agencies took root during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson in particular disliked the Constitution and wanted government by bureaucratic experts shielded from political control. Thus evolved today’s government alphabet soup of the SEC, FCC, FTC, FEC, CFTC, CFPB, FERC, FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and more."

"His argument, echoed by many modern conservative scholars, is that insulation from presidential authority runs counter to Article II’s command that the President “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” If Congress has charged such agencies with enforcing laws, then the President should be able to supervise how they do their job."

"His order requires these agencies to submit proposed and final rules to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House. OIRA, which is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will review rules to ensure their cost-benefit and legal analysis is rigorous"

"it is restoring the vision of the Founders who gave the President control over the executive branch. Today that control can be divided, as it is on antitrust policy, for example. The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department both enforce antitrust and consumer protection laws. But the Attorney General answers to the President, while the FTC Chair doesn’t. This makes no logical governing sense."

"increasingly these “independent” agencies aren’t really independent. After Barack Obama endorsed regulating broadband providers as common carriers, his FCC Chair Tom Wheeler promulgated a net-neutrality rule that did so. Does anyone believe Mr. Wheeler was acting independently?"

"Joe Biden issued executive orders “encouraging” various independent agencies to “consider” issuing regulations—for instance, an FTC ban on non-compete agreements. They followed his orders."

"these bureaucracies have vast power over the lives and livelihoods of Americans. When they exceed their authority, a President should be able to hear and represent public complaints."

"Congress would still have its power of the purse, oversight, and advice and consent over nominees."

On This One, Tesla Is a DOGE Loser

Trump’s rollback of EV charging subsidies hurts Musk’s car company

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The 2021 infrastructure bill allocates $5 billion for states to install EV chargers with the goal of building a nationwide network of 500,000 stations by 2030. The Biden Administration was slow to disburse the money because it layered on mandates. Only $511 million has been awarded, and a mere 58 stations are in operation."

"the Transportation Department paused the program to ensure state charging plans “align with current U.S. DOT policy and priorities.” As well it should. Some federally funded stations have reportedly broken down. 

States warned in their grant applications that Biden mandates, including one that stations be located every 50 miles along interstate highways, could lead to “stranded assets.” A dearth of customers in rural areas could make stations unprofitable and require states to spend taxpayer dollars maintaining them."

"the Biden auto emissions standards and waiver for California’s EV mandate. Most auto makers can’t meet either and would likely have to buy regulatory credits from Tesla to comply."

Why ‘Wards of Washington’ Don’t Work Well

Red states can justifiably ask whether federal grants are truly benefiting them

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Regarding “Republican States Are ‘Wards of Washington’” (Letters, Feb. 12): Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques note that taxes raised in wealthy blue states help subsidize red states’ budgets. The subtext: Republicans shouldn’t complain about Democrats’ profligacy with federal grants.

But red states can justifiably ask whether such grants are truly benefiting them. Even with some revenue transfers between states, federal grant money is largely raised from taxes on citizens in the same states that receive it. In practice the federal government taxes state residents, routes the money through Washington, takes a cut off of the top for the federal bureaucracy and returns the sum to states with restrictions on how they can spend it.

From any logical viewpoint this is a bad way to run a federal system. In 2022 more than $1 trillion, or more than 35% of all state revenue, came from the federal government. More budget-conscious red states would tax and spend far less in a system less reliant on these grants. They would also impose more requirements about work or personal contributions for welfare programs, which are often refused by the same Washington bureaucracy that approves expansions of such programs in blue states. Even if a state receives a certain amount of federal dollars, that doesn’t mean those are the sorts of dollars for the sorts of programs they want.

In a system where states were true laboratories of democracy, they could use their own residents’ funds to craft their own health, transportation, education and welfare systems. These would doubtless be less costly than the federally funded ones. But for some reason Washington thinks that the further away the political representatives and the bureaucracy, the wiser the government will be in dictating the terms of these programs. This is incorrect, and representatives in both red and blue states know it.

Judge Glock

Manhattan Institute"

Florida vs. California Insurance, Round 2

Rates fall in the Sunshine State after DeSantis’s reforms, but they soar on the left coast

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Democratic insurance regulators in the Golden State for years have suppressed rates even as home values have ballooned. State Farm, California’s largest fire insurer, earlier this month said that it has paid $1.26 in claims for every $1 it has collected in premiums over the last nine years, resulting in $5 billion in underwriting losses.

Progressives blame poor underwriting, but California until recently was the only state to prohibit insurers from pricing re-insurance costs into premiums and using catastrophe models to adjust rates. The state also bars insurers from dropping policies in areas affected by fires for a year thereafter, which has made it hard to limit exposure.

Regulators typically take more than a year to approve rate increases—and usually for less than insurers request—because they first solicit feedback from “consumer advocates”—i.e., liberal outfits. State Farm still hasn’t received approval for a 30% rate increase that it asked for last June and says that it isn’t meeting capital requirements."

"By contrast, Mr. DeSantis spearheaded a series of litigation reforms in 2022 and 2023 that have headed off an insurance disaster. Insurers had been raising rates by double digits annually and fleeing the market because of rampant lawsuit abuse, which ballooned the liabilities at the Florida insurer of last resort, Citizens Property.

Mr. DeSantis this month said 11 new insurers have entered the market over the last two years as a result of tort reforms. Since 2022 more than 477,000 policies have shifted from Citizens Property back to the private market, which will reduce the risk of a taxpayer bailout if there’s a bad storm.

Some criticized our January editorial on Florida’s reforms because home insurance rates rose 102% between 2020 and 2023. But that was before most reforms took effect and was the reason lawmakers undertook them. Now rates are coming down as litigation abuse abates.

Citizens now plans to cut rates on average by 5.6% for 20% of policyholders. Four of the state’s top 10 carriers have filed for rate decreases. The Governor said Florida had the lowest average homeowners’ premium increases in the nation this past year—just 1%. Homeowners in many other states have experienced increases of 20% or more."

California’s EV Mandate Goes to Congress for Repeal

The GOP can rescue the country from onerous rules that are impossible for auto makers to meet

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The Biden Administration in December approved a waiver letting California set its own vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions standards. The Clean Air Act lets the Environmental Protection Agency grant such a waiver only to meet “compelling and extraordinary conditions.” This waiver authority was intended to help California reduce pollutants that contribute to smog.

But CO2 doesn’t cause smog, and California doesn’t have any more compelling need to regulate vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions than any other state. Nonetheless, the Biden EPA approved the state’s ban on new internal-combustion engine cars by 2035 and progressive “zero-emission vehicle” quotas for auto makers. 

Zero-emission vehicles would have to account for 43% of an auto maker’s sales in 2027 in California and a dozen or so other states that have adopted its rules. This increases to 68% by 2030."

"EVs made up only 13% of traditional auto-maker sales in California in 2023 and even less in such states as Massachusetts (8%), New Jersey (7%) and New York (6%) that have adopted the Golden State’s rules."

How Zoning Ruined the Housing Market in Blue-State America

For a century, progressives have been making it harder to build new homes in prosperous areas. Workers, immigrants and the economy pay the price

By Yoni Applebaum. Excerpts:

"The answer is that the rules were intended to make it all but impossible to build, not just in California but in much of blue-state America. The efforts of three generations of progressive reformers, seeking to address the problems of their eras, have created a regulatory regime in much of the country that has made it extraordinarily difficult to build new housing where it is needed most."

"As recently as 1970, one in five Americans moved each year. But after a half-century of steady decline, the Census announced in December that we had set a dismal new record, with scarcely one in 13 people relocating to a new home."

"That’s not just a problem for those who are stuck. It’s a big cost for all Americans—by one estimate, lowering GDP by $1.8 trillion each year."

"At the beginning of the 20th century, a young architect named Charles Cheney worried that the “well established homes in comfortable and quiet districts” of Berkeley, Calif., were being threatened by an “invasion of flats and apartments.” Cheney was a prototypical reformer of the Progressive Era—young, well-educated, affluent and eager to use the power of government to solve social problems.

In this case, the problem was right in his own backyard: Someone had built an apartment building just down the street. In public reports, Cheney worried about replicating the slums of eastern cities."

"The first zoning laws in the U.S. had been adopted by California cities three decades earlier, to force out their Chinese residents. Racial discrimination was unconstitutional, but these cities found a workaround: They could exclude laundries, the primary source of employment for the Chinese."

"He convinced Berkeley to adopt the nation’s first single-family housing district, barring any more apartments from being built in his neighborhood. And he wasn’t subtle. Only single-family zoning, he explained, could “firmly establish this great principle of protecting the home against the intrusion of the less desirable and floating renter class.”"

"Within a few decades, cities throughout the country were covered in a patchwork-quilt of land-use regulations"

"The New Deal brought a second generation of reformers, who decided that neighborhoods could only qualify for the highest federal credit rating, and the loans that came with it, if they adopted strict zoning codes. They also worried that racial integration would depress property values, imposing losses on the government—so they insisted that properties come with private restrictive covenants limiting their sale to “the race for which they are intended.”"

"In the 1970s, the state passed new laws mandating extensive review and permitting processes and giving the public broad rights to weigh in and challenge its decisions."

"they had made all private development subject to governmental approval."

"anyone with sufficient time and money could exercise an effective veto over new development."

"“We need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people,” Barack Obama told the Democratic Convention last year."

"Every year since 2000, the number of Californians moving out of the state has outstripped the number of Americans moving in, by a cumulative total of millions, and the lowest-income residents were likeliest to leave. More than 170,000 Californians now lack any housing at all, living out on the streets." 

"If paring back a century’s worth of rules and regulations is the right way to rebuild after a fire, it’s the right way to build—period."