This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.
1. Obama’s jobs council calls for more drilling, pipelines
The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness issued it year-end report yesterday, and its recommendations on energy policy are at near-complete odds with those of the environmental movement and its foot-soldier-in-chief, President Barack Obama, who appointed the commission. According to The Hill newspaper, the council is recommending "more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands" (you read that right; they said coal) and the building of more pipelines, suggesting that these projects could generate "hundreds of thousands" of jobs.
According to the Hill:
The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that "deliver electricity and fuel," including pipelines.
The question is, will the president treat this report in the same way that he treated the recommendations of his deficit reduction commission? Namely, will he completely ignore it? THIS JUST IN: He has completely ignored it. Obama just rejected the Keystone pipeline.
2. Even Brits are rejecting electric cars: charging stations outnumber cars
According to this article in the UK’s Daily Mail, citizens in Great Britain are flocking away from electric cars in droves, to the point where there are actually more charging stations then there are electric cars on the road. The Mail reports that
Sales of electric cars have slumped so badly that there are now more charging points than vehicles on the road.
Just 2,149 electric cars have been sold since 2006, despite a government scheme last year offering customers up to [5,000 pounds] towards the cost of a vehicle.
The Department for Transport says that around 2,500 charging points have been installed. …The government is spending [30 million pounds] on publicly funded charging points.
Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute points out the irony in this news:
Electric car proponents have often sold them as the perfect commuter vehicle for heavily urbanized environments. After all, the commute is short, so range anxiety shouldn’t be a problem, there are plenty of places to plug in at origin and destination, the smaller size should aid in finding parking and making better use of available parking space, and so on and so forth. European cities, with their dense planning patterns should, in theory, be ideal for electric vehicles.
3. Free solar power busts the budget
This article from the Florida Time Union, which discusses the use of solar-powered cars by the Jacksonville Police Department, seems to miss a rather obvious irony in its story. Early in the article, it quotes assistant policy chief John Lamb as saying, "We wanted to look for alternatives to combat the problems, and solar is free." At the end of the article it quotes Lamb again, this time as saying, "We took such a hit with the budget. … It made sense to cut the solar panels and make up some of that difference."
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