Despite Louisiana’s Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry’s best efforts, Democrat Pres. Joe Biden and his party seem determined to make people pay for their climate alarmism fantasies.
Landry spearheaded an effort to scrap the social cost of carbon metric reestablished by the Biden Administration on its first day in office, which about a month later began forcing inclusion of that old figure in, among other things, putative lease sales of federal land for energy exploration. Landry sued shortly thereafter, but until the judiciary late last year ruled that, in another suit headlined by Landry, Biden had illegally prevented such lease sales from going forward and had to carry these out, the matter was moot.
With these set to move forward again, earlier this month a different court ruled that Landry and the other plaintiffs had the standing to challenge the cost forwarded by the Biden group convened to create it (largely a holdover figure from the Democrat Pres. Barack Obama Administration, which early on completed a sue-and-settle arrangement giving birth to the noxious notion that there existed this cost justified by the alleged negative impact man-made carbon emitting on all things) and that this reestablishment violated the Administrative Procedures Act because it hastily acted and did not follow through the entire process. By definition, the injunction issued carries an implication that a full trial would favor the plaintiffs’ argument, on the basis that the framework producing the number didn’t follow the law and therefore was made capriciously.
Irony attaches to this, because the procedures used by the Obama Administration to calculate this “interim” value themselves have little scientific backing and are fraught with opaqueness, imprecision, and political infusion. Perhaps demonstrating this, the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration took the formulas and changed a couple of parameters to take what had been a range of $15-$150 a metric ton to $1-$7. But with the injunction, the central value reset by Biden of $51 can’t apply. (The court agreed with the plaintiffs’ assertion that removing international considerations, as Trump had, was more consistent with the law.)
The value is of immense importance. The higher the artificial number goes, the more expensive use of fossil fuel sources becomes for accounting purposes and the more likely the federal government (and some states) will eschew their use, refrain from selling rights for their use, or would use as a cudgel against the private sector in certain cases such as in setting fleet efficiency numbers for vehicle manufacturers. Conversely, it artificially lowers the “cost” of using much more expensive renewable energy, forcing the higher real costs onto taxpayers and consumers.
Thus, climate alarmists find this concept of immense value in foisting their catastrophic anthropogenic global warming scenario-based agenda onto an unsuspecting public. Since it is a matter of regulatory rather than legislative politics, it can be used as a behind-the-scenes tactic to pass on these increased costs unaware.
And even in defeat. Determined to take his pound of flesh, Biden’s Administration appealed the injunction and announced that it yet again would suspend the lease sales the law obligates it to perform because it now has to recompute all the costs involved. In reality, that takes little effort by using the range legally in force.
Meanwhile, Americans will suffer down the road because any further delay in the sales advances the date on which the country loses energy independence and pushes into the future the day on which it could recapture that, as well as consumers having to submit to higher prices as well in the interim. Maybe Landry should drag the nearly year-long delay back into court to counter the Biden and the left’s spitefulness over his other effort that simply asks for leftist elites to follow the rule of law.
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