NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Given the Supreme Court's holding in West Virginia v. EPA, a conservative policy advocate's call to be sure that advocates for energy don't pile on to already tough issues by increasing taxes seems like an idea worth further scrutiny.
They just cannot conceive of an energy plan, that, whatever else it contains, and it may have a lot of meritorious things, has some nod to climate change in it. For whatever reason, they've decided the least bad thing would be a tax, according to Free market policy expert Phil Kerpen with American Commitment.
The American Petroleum Institute’s climate committee approved a surcharge on gasoline and other fossil fuels to discourage greenhouse-gas emissions. Given that the Supreme Court just held that the EPA can't do greenhouse gas regulation on its own, this is an issue that's likely to come before Congress. Reuters also reported last week that France's Emanuel Macron told President Biden that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are almost at the capacity of what they can do.
"We should be producing two or three more million barrels a day than we are," Kerpen said. "We have most of the world's swing capacity. The whole rest of the world is like, what the heck is going on? They're like going crazy that we have such insane policies that the entire world is suffering economically as a consequence of."
There is an idea floating around to tax only imported oil, but right now the American energy industry has a confidence problem.
"Even if they came out tomorrow and said, we're calling off the dogs at the EPA and Interior and the SEC and Treasury and we're going to call a truce on all this global warming stuff, how do you get these companies and the markets to believe you enough to invest billions of dollars into assets that need to have a 40 year life, when they kind of know that your real plan is to shut them down in the medium term after they survive politically?"
The economy is likely to be a primary issue in the midterm Congressional races this fall.