Perhaps the best news to come out of this week’s agreement to finally give birth to a new and long overdue state budget is the death of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).
It was the bogus darling of ecocrats who sought to seize control of the state’s energy sector under the guise of corralling “climate change.”
In truth, it was a power grab – literally and figuratively — by hubris-filled and/or just plain ignorant command-seeking bureaucrats to re-order the Keystone State’s economy in their warped “progressive” vision. Left to its devices, RGGI would have been an economic disaster.
As SpotlightPA reported it, Pennsylvania’s entrance into RGGI long had been “a sore spot in Harrisburg, pitting environmentalists against business interests and organized labor” and, we would add, the fundamental, immutable laws of economics.
It was then-Gov. Tom Wolf who, through a dubious executive order, unilaterally directed the state to enter RGGI. The matter still is before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But a lower appellate court ruled Wolf improperly conscripted the power of the state Legislature – primarily to tax, at the debate’s base — where RGGI had no or shaky-legs support.
The bottom line is that RGGI’s diktats, led by a spurious emissions cap-and-trade regimen, would significantly raise the cost of doing business in the commonwealth through higher electricity rates and with negligible environmental benefits. It is no hyperbole to state that RGGI would have destroyed Pennsylvania’s electric-generating industry, if the not the long fragile electricity grid with it.
Simply put, the heavy hand of government was overkill, as government interventionism usually is. It was back in October 2019 (in Brief Vol. 19, No. 37) that Elizabeth Miller, a research associate at the Allegheny Institute, and Frank Gamrat, its executive director, concluded:
“Pennsylvania has experienced an impressive reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in recent years without joining RGGI. Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, has largely replaced coal as the leading fuel for electricity generation in the state.
“The EPA’s data for Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Pennsylvania showcases the extraordinary results: carbon dioxide emissions in the state from 2000 to 2016 fell by 26 percent,” the think tank researchers said.
And they reminded that Pennsylvania reduced carbon dioxide emissions through bona fide market solutions – not the faux government market — and without the tax burden that RGGI would impose.
“The increased energy prices for taxpayers, loss of jobs due to mounting energy costs and second-order effects resulting from higher electricity costs are strong arguments against joining RGGI,” Miller and Gamrat said six years ago.
“Joining RGGI would be an ill-advised decision that would undermine much of the economic and environmental success the state has enjoyed in the last decade thanks to natural gas production in the electricity market,” they concluded.
Those incontrovertible facts remain the same six years later.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was the latest in a long line of government- and econuts’-hatched schemes to despoil hardworking, capital-risking Pennsylvanians of the fruits of their labors. Talk about “public purpose” sophistry at its worst. We should all celebrate RGGI’s implosion.
But just to make sure RGGI — or anything even remotely resembling it — never finds the light of day again, and in the “spirit” of the coming season, we suggest a stake of holly be driven through the hearts of such farcical proposals and then their blueprints be boiled and dissolved in their own pudding.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
