Consumer Watchdog – Cheaper, Cleaner Energy - Blog

Interesting that it took a New York newspaper to tell Californians that a couple of giant Texas oil refining companies are bankrolling a ballot initiative to kill the state's popular climate change/green energy law. The whole saga is much like Oklahoma oilman T. Boone Pickens' failed effort in 2008 to make California taxpayers subsidize his natural gas business. Except that Pickens was honest about paying for his own ballot initiative.

While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil interests, large agribusiness and... senior citizens? Yes, the first member group that pops up on the website of Energy Citizens, an organization solely aimed at killing climate legislation, is a group called "The 60-Plus Association." It's a name that sticks in memory, because it's all over the member lists of anti-reform groups in the health care battle, sort of the anti-AARP. And I've run into them before.

When a private club that is too cozy with corporations make the rules on consumer protection, guess what happens? The National Conference on Weights and Measures met last week voted to just dump years' worth of proposals and plans to fix the "hot fuel" ripoff.  It reminded me of the old Soviet trick of removing purged bureaucrats from ceremonial photos.

The major oil companies all made less profit in 2009, but mostly because they could barely make a billion on refining and selling gasoline and diesel fuel, with demand running from down to stagnant. Yet they made plenty of billions on drilling and selling oil, which has more than doubled in price from around $30 a barrel (42 gallons) at the end of 2008 to around $75 a barrel on Monday. Yet global oil consumption was also down in 2009 from 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Does this make any sense at all?

 Why be obsessed with the price of gasoline? Easy. High energy prices, including prices at the pump, will slow and even reverse economic recovery. Every 10-cent a gallon increase in the price of a gallon of gas means another $1 billion  less for consumers to spend on anything else. Drivers are spending $50 a month more on gasoline than they were a year ago, when prices bottomed out.No wonder the oil industry wants climate change legislation to go away.

Supplies of oil and fuel in the U.S. are up, and so is the price of oil--it has surged to $82 dollar a barrel, pushing gasoline over $3.00 a gallon in California. Wait, isn't price supposed to go down as supplies rise? This kind of speculator-driven disconnection of energy prices from supply and demand trashed the economy in 2008, and regulators need to act before the usual spring spike in gasoline prices. The regulatory sheriffs might make the deadline, according to a Bloomberg report:

If you had to choose between oil and water, one or the other, which would you choose? Living without oil or natural gas wouldn't be fun, but you wouldn't live at all without drinkable water. Which raises another question: Why is Exxon's huge bet on natural gas drilling that may widely contaminate U.S. drinking water being so widely praised, with so little examination? It's a combination of media that tend to lump all natural gas together, and gigantic regulatory loopholes that protect Exxon and other shale-gas drillers from even telling us what they're putting into our water.

It's a cheap shot, but I'm never above making the oil lobby look phony and stupid. Thanks to TPM for posting a photo from an American Petroleum Institute pamphlet that appears to show a (slightly) racially diverse group of industry employees. Except... 1. It's a stock photo of some random group. 2. The race of two figures was changed, one from white to black, the other from white to Asian. 3. Both are really the same man.

On the other fossil fuel front, Sen. Robert Byrd, the coal industry's best ally in Washington for decades, is standing up against its current scare campaign in West Virginia, and its demand to continue "mountaintop removal" mining. The EPA has held up new permits for this destructive and polluting form of coal extraction, and coal companies are telling West Virginians that they'll all lose their jobs.

California doesn't have much going for it lately, with a new $21 billion hole in its budget, more than 12% unemployment and a hapless state Legislature. But it provided cause for cheer today with its own climate regulation proposal. Because the underlying legislation (small PDF) is already in place the state is way ahead of Washington. It may be ahead of Washington on long-term economic health as well, just by signaling a stable future for green tech.