Remember this nonsense as the debate over Pennsylvania’s involvement with the dubious Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) continues to roll along, in the state Supreme Court and in the court of public opinion:
The Los Angeles Times has editorialized – in a stunning exercise of economic and practical ignorance — that the state of California must stop investing public pension funds in fossil fuel energy companies and, eventually, disinvest in the same.
The current portfolio amounts to about $15 billion.
“This divestment … is the right step, not only on moral grounds, but because it’s financially prudent,” the editorial claims. “In a world where the effects of climate change are intensifying, the necessary and accelerating shift to renewable energy makes these investments too volatile and risky to hold onto long-term.”
But that’s because of dedicated government corruption of the energy marketplace. And there’s absolutely nothing “moral” or “financially prudent” about using the heavy cudgel of “The State” to drive necessary and legitimate business into insolvency in pursuit of “green” energy that not only is anything but, but also wholly unreliable and massively expensive – for consumers and taxpayers alike.
As my late father once asked me as a teenager after I prosecuted some wildly illogical crock, “Where you born with that hole in your head or have you had to work overtime to develop it?”
Concludes the rather lengthy editorial, which is nothing more than an eco-whacko screed:
“As the climate crisis and its impacts accelerate and the toll of investment [in fossil fuels] becomes clearer with each passing wildfire season, smoke siege and heat wave, business-as-usual is simply untenable. California should stop adding to the risk by investing its money in a sustainable future.”
And as one most observant editorial reader sums it up in a wonderfully succinct seven lines of spot-on prose:
“The last sentence of this [editorial] describes exactly what is happening today to this country with government using taxpayers’ dollars to bail out their failed economic development plans and projects. The country is in a bottomless hole of debt and well on its way to bankruptcy and eventual communist takeover. I blame the politicians who are running the governments of the country from the national down to the community level and the voters who put them into office.”
Or as we are wont to remind in so many crocks of government creation (with a tip o’ the hat to legendary cartoon character Pogo): “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Back to RGGI:
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is billed as a multi-state effort to reduce carbon emissions. Virginia, which had been a signatory, recently left RGGI for the pig in a poke that it is.
Pennsylvania joined RGGI last year. It was an act of fiat by the administration of the previous governor, Tom Wolf. It was the first major fossil fuel-producing state to do so. But it is far from being a fait acompli.
Though the public policy “benefits” vs. detriment loom large, as they should, Pennsylvania’s RGGI membership is pending before the state Supreme Court in a fundamental constitutional case.
Republicans controlling the state Senate, who opposed joining RGGI, maintain – and rightly so, as the Allegheny Institute has concluded – that RGGI is a tax on energy producers and that the legislative branch is the only branch of government that can enact new taxes.
The executive branch contends any imposts imposed via RGGI are permissible administrative fees. It’s a position long the last refuge of the growing administrative state.
The bottom line is that RGGI is no less than a “social justice” tax on fossil fuel producers, including natural gas, that has had negligible environmental results.
And it is that use of natural gas – once hailed as a “clean” fuel of the future but now panned by those whose primary goal is not cleaner air but wealth redistribution through a perverted government-created “marketplace” – that has led Pennsylvania to cleaner air.
RGGI will lead to higher electricity prices, a less stable power grid and retard the economy.
As pigs in a poke go, these are some very large pigs in a very large poke.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
