OPINION/COMMENTARY

The Case Against Conservation by Regulation

To be sure, energy will be conserved this year by voluntary measures--and especially this coming winter, when heating oil prices are expected to be high. The Post reports that the Administration is asking citizens to conserve "to combat high costs this winter," but that's backwards. Energy will be conserved because of high costs and high prices. And we're already seeing this at work. Already, sales of SUVs have plummeted. This makes sense--gasoline is now expensive and looks to be so for at least the near future. The price of owning an SUV went up, and so fewer people are purchasing them. By anecdotal accounts, carpooling is up; WMATA reports that subway ridership is up in Washington; and even the region's bus companies are reporting increased business. The price of driving went up, and so people are driving less, curtailing unnecessary trips or accepting a bit of inconvenience (subways, carpools, buses) in exchange for the great savings of not driving. This is not conservation as public policy; rather, it is individual actors making voluntary choices in the marketplace based on price. Consumers are doing all this on their own, beginning well before the Department of Energy's conservation campaign. By disseminating information, the Department of Energy may goad a few more citizens into making better decisions, but the bulk will be prodded by prices alone....

No Comment’ from the Washington Post

Michael Getler, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, must not have liked the complaint we sent him two weeks ago, seeking action on an article in which a reporter seemed to act as nothing more than a willing stenographer for anti-ANWR drilling propaganda. He didn’t respond directly, and he didn’t respond publicly. Perhaps he’s just been too busy, working from bad story to bad story, more getting nailed daily by a growing corps of blog researchers. Perhaps he’s just a dead letter drop where complaints go to be buried so as not to interfere with the newspaper’s mission, which in many cases would not currently be mistaken for objective journalism. Perhaps he was too distracted by getting his new job as ombudsman for PBS, its first, which he will take next month. Regardless, we made our point, with documentation sufficient to raise red flags. (Read “Who You Gonna Trust: CFIF or the Washington Post?”) All newspapers make mistakes. But those that won’t correct them in a straightforward, timely manner have no claim to credibility. Why, The New York Times just issued its fourth correction for one Paul Krugman column. That may not instill great confidence in Krugman’s accuracy, but it’s something....

COURT OF APPEALS REFUSES TO REVIEW ERRONEOUS RULING

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today declined to reconsider its decision that the federal government is exempt from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling as to when a case is moot as a result of the voluntary cessation of illegal activity. A Montana hunting group had urged the appellate court to rehear an earlier decision by one of the court’s three judge panels. Montana Shooting Sports Association, a firearm safety and hunting group, in a motion for rehearing en banc, asked the entire court to reverse the panel’s ruling that the federal government is exempt from the Supreme Court’s requirement that a party who, after being sued, ceases its illegal conduct must prove that the illegal conduct will not recur. The panel had ruled that the federal government’s withdrawal of its order closing 20,000 acres in Phillips County in north-central Montana must be dismissed unless the group proves that the federal government would reissue the order. The Court of Appeals gave no reason for its denial. In 1994, the Bureau of Land Management of the U.S. Department of the Interior adopted a management plan for 2.8 million acres of federal land in six counties in north-central Montana. Under the plan, a 20,000 acre area in Phillips County was to remain open, as it always had been, to the hunting of unregulated wildlife, such as prairie dogs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had announced its intention to bring a “nonessential” experimental population of captive-raised black-footed ferrets into a vast region, including land in Phillips County and neighboring Blaine County, which included some land covered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plan. In October 1999, the BLM announced that the 20,000 acre area, which is known as “the 40 Complex,” would be closed to the “discharge or use of firearms” in order “to protect habitat for the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret[].” The BLM relied on assertions by the FWS that black-footed ferrets depend on prairie dogs for food and prairie dog towns for shelter....

Energy security and natural disasters

Reps. Jim Saxton and Eliot Engel claim the destruction inflicted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita "has been a jarring reminder of our over reliance on oil" ("Energy security and oil dependence," Commentary, Monday). But Katrina and Rita also left millions of people without food, water, electricity, medicine and housing. Does that mean we are overly reliant on those necessities, too? Do Mr. Saxton and Mr. Engel think disaster-induced shortages of housing, electricity, etc. are good reasons for politicians to try and end our "dependence" on such essentials? Unsurprisingly, Mr. Saxton and Mr. Engel ignore their own role in weakening U.S. energy security. One reason so much energy infrastructure is located in hurricane alley is that politicians of anti-supply-side bent have enacted moratoriums prohibiting oil and gas operations on the Atlantic Coast, the California coast and the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. In their eagerness to regulate Americans into "energy-efficient" (read: smaller, less-crash-worthy, more expensive) cars, Mr. Saxton and Mr. Engel forget that widespread lack of car ownership contributed directly to Katrina's high death toll....

ENVIROS' ATTACK ON GAS PIPELINE IS MOOT

A challenge by an environmental group to the environmental documents relied on by the federal government in authorizing construction of a gas pipeline is moot, a Montana federal district court in Great Falls was advised today. Macum Energy of Billings, a small, family-owned company, advised the district court that, following the court’s March 2004 ruling that the documents were inadequate, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had prepared new documents that were not challenged by Montana Wilderness Association, which filed the original lawsuit in March 2000. Therefore, argued Macum, the environmental group’s original challenge is now moot and should be dismissed. To grant the relief that the group sought--removal of the pipeline--would unfairly punish Macum and render the BLM’s corrected decision-making process a nullity. “The BLM did everything that the Montana federal district court ordered it to do and, it is now clear, the new documents comply fully with federal law,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents Macum. "In fact, the Montana Wilderness Association must believe that the new documents comply fully with federal law because they have not filed any challenge to those documents.” In September 1999, the BLM made available more than 180 parcels of federal land in a competitive oil and gas lease sale at which time Macum purchased the three leases at issue in the lawsuit. In November 1999, Macum asked for and received permission for a pipeline to deliver natural gas from its previously existing wells to market. In December 1999, Macum installed the pipeline along an existing road and began selling gas. Later, Macum made application for permits to drill (APDs) natural gas wells on the new BLM leases. On March 30, 2000, BLM's approval process for those APDs was halted when the Montana Wilderness Association filed its lawsuit after it learned that President Clinton would create a national monument in the area....

Habitat and Humanity

If there is a Don Quixote of federal laws, it is the Endangered Species Act (ESA): For over three decades this law's regulations have endangered the species in distress that they are endeavoring to protect. The House last Thursday took the first step toward injecting a dose of sanity into species recovery efforts by passing the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act (TESRA), a bill that fixes the perverse incentives in the original legislation that pit property owners against wildlife. But the Bush administration will have to do some political heavy-lifting to push this reform bill over the hurdles it still faces in the Senate. The problems with the original Endangered Species Act are legion: Landowners and taxpayers have been spending the equivalent of $3.5 billion annually in ESA-related activities and managed to recover only 10 of the 1,300 species listed as "endangered" or "threatened" -- a success rate of less than one percent. Part of this failure stems from the fact that the Department of Interior, the chief enforcer of the ESA, has been forced to make listing decisions by legal fiat rather than by appealing to some kind of objective scientific standards. This has resulted in a terrible misallocation of precious conservation dollars toward species that either could not be saved or were in no need of saving. TERSA, crafted by California Republican Richard Pombo, would overcome this problem by requiring a peer review of all the scientific data before a decision is made to list a species as endangered. In the interest of transparency it will also require the department to post on a publicly available website all the data that it used to make the endangered determination....

===