Deming to pitch anti-cap and trade message at chamber event

Members of the Fort Smith Regional Chamber of Commerce are most likely to hear a passionate speech against the proposed federal cap and trade legislation during an Aug. 28 luncheon held at Hardscrabble Country Club in Fort Smith.

The chamber announced Wednesday that prominent Arkansas business leader Claiborne Deming will deliver a “major presentation” on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, commonly referred to the cap and trade bill and the Waxman-Markey bill.

Deming was the president and CEO of El Dorado-based Murphy Oil Corp. between October 1994 and December 2008, where he continues to serve as chairman of the Murphy Oil executive committee. He also was behind the El Dorado Promise, a $50 million program funded by Murphy Oil that provides scholarships to qualified graduates of the El Dorado Public School system.

CAP AND TRADE
Among its numerous provisions, the proposed bill establishes a national energy production standard requiring 20% of retail electric sales to come from combined renewable energy and energy efficiency by 2020. The bill also establishes greenhouse cap and trade provisions that cover 85% of the overall economy, including electricity producers, oil refineries, natural gas suppIiers, and energy-intensive industries like iron, steel, cement and paper manufacturers, according to the filing by Entergy Arkansas.

The bill was approved by the U.S House of Representatives on June 26 on a 219-212 vote. U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Little Rock, was the only member of Arkansas’ delegation in the House to vote for the bill. It is now on the Senate calendar.

Most Arkansans oppose the cap and trade bill. According to polling information from Roby Brock at TalkBusiness.net, 56% of Arkansans “somewhat oppose” (17%) or “strongly oppose” (39%) the cap and trade legislation. U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., has said she opposes the bill.

Several Arkansas-based utilities reported Aug. 7 to the Arkansas Public Service Commission that they expect the proposed federal cap and trade legislation to increase costs for their customers. The proposed federal cap and trade legislation could raise some annual utility bills in Arkansas by as much as $870 a year by 2030.

The reports are not a surprise considering that the Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that the average American utility consumer would see a $175 annual increase in their utility bill by 2020 as a result of the proposed legislation.

DEMING INTERVIEW
Little Rock journalist Roby Brock recently interviewed Deming for an article in Brock’s TBQ (Talk Business Quarterly) magazine. Deming was clear in his opposition to the proposed cap and trade bill, according to the following excerpts from Brock’s interview.
www.talkbusiness.net

Brock: Your argument is that Waxman-Markey is not really going to change the behavior that it, in theory, is supposed to change.

Deming: Sure. If you’re not going to include the developing world where, it’s silly to have a bill that somehow isn’t conditioned upon them (India and China) joining us. If you exempt coal burning utilities, coal the most carbon intensive of all the fossil fuels, then it’s silly to call this thing something that addresses climate change. So what it does do, is it goes to the American motoring public, and the American motoring public is responsible for 40% of all the emissions, about equal to the utilities, and they only gave the motorists 2% of their permits for free, so we have to go buy the other 38-40%, so we have to pass that on, so you’re going to burden the American motorists with additional costs on gasoline, likely put some refiners out of business who can’t pass the cost on, especially small refiners. It’s not going to solve the problem.

So when you think about it, what the bill really is, it’s two things to me: one, it’s political payback. A group’s in power in Congress and they have certain groups that they want to reward. And so they’ve rewarded heavily-unionized big industry. They’re rewarding certain politically powerful utilities, big lobbying groups, and big Washington offices. And they’re harming the oil and gas industry, which they view as an enemy and they don’t like. So it’s old fashioned, wonderful political payback: reward your friends and harm your enemies.

And then the other piece is they want to impose a lifestyle change on Americans. Let me tell you a few things in this bill. They’re going to require all new buildings starting in 2012 are 30% more energy efficient, both residences and businesses. 2015 – 50% more energy efficient. Do you know what that building looks like? Do you want to live in a building like that right away? That’s what they want to do.

There’s another piece in it, when they allocated these free carbon permits, they went to a low-income segment of America and they gave them 15% of all the carbon permits. When this thing gets up and going, if there’s a vibrant carbon market — hundreds of billions of dollars. And that’s going to be given to a low-income segment, either as a direct electronic funds transfer, or a credit to your taxes. So it’s one of the biggest increases in transfer payments, since probably Social Security. You’d never know it from the title of the act or from the fact that it’s supposed to address climate change, that’s included in it.

The bill doesn’t promote nuclear power. The only scalable way to generate power that’s non-carbon sourced is nuclear power. We’re already generating 20% of the power in America by nuclear power. France is 80%. If you’re serious about climate change, you have to use nuclear power as a way to generate electricity. And windmills and solar, it’s a sideshow. It embarrasses me as an American. The Dutch first used wind power in the 14th, 15th century and now we’re back doing it again. It’s not scalable; it mars the landscape. …

Natural gas — look at what we’ve learned in the last 5 years through technology and horizontal drilling and a different type of reservoir shale is now reservoir rock. It’s revolutionary in our business. Natural gas is everywhere, it’s got about 50% of the carbon-intensity or even less than coal does. Why not encourage that? The bill doesn’t address that. So it doesn’t encourage nuclear power, it doesn’t encourage natural gas.

How about diesel fuel? Diesel fuel is 25% more fuel efficient than gasoline. The Europeans just figured this out, like, whammo. And so their tax structure encourages the use of diesel engines in cars. That’s like taking one out of every four cars off the road if you massively dieselize the automobile fleet, the truck fleet. There’s no particular cost to America, the technology is there, the infrastructure, we’re not going to have to rebuild billions in new infrastructure, but because it encourages the use of hydrocarbons, even though it’s inexpensive and accomplishes the goal. So that’s why the bill doesn’t address climate change, and it’s old time political payback to enemies and favoritism to friends and it’s too extremist on the West and East Coast, who’ve hijacked the climate issue to impose a lifestyle change, that by the way I doubt that they’ll adopt.

• Other Deming comments include:
“Now think about this hypocrisy: the price of gasoline goes up because crude oil went up.  They bring a bunch of oil company executives, embarrass them, of course they can’t control the oil markets. 80% of all the oil is in the Middle East controlled by national governments. They excoriate these people. The price of oil goes down. They secretly hate low gas prices, because that means people are going to drive more. So the cap and trade bill is a way to artificially increase the price of gasoline, which is what they really want. So they’re going to be responsible for increasing the price of gasoline after excoriating these oil company executives who were not responsible for it, but they could come up with a political blame game. I call that hypocrisy to the max.”

• As to climate change, Deming noted:
“You know what I believe, I think that they use models that are extremely sophisticated and are all based on inputs and data that they make projections on. And I challenge anyone, me, you, the guy behind the camera, anybody to go out there and say "I understand that, I understand that model and I can see what the predictions are going to be.

“So what I say is, I think there are likely changes going on, but how severe, what the different interactions between oceans and clouds and vapor and water is going to be, I don’t think anybody knows. And so when there is that much uncertainty involved in it, to come in here and literally cripple the American economy when you’re not going to impact the problem at all, or just a little bit on the margin maybe, is ridiculous, it’s horrible public policy. It’s got a dishonest streak because you’re not calling it a tax and it is, and you’re trying to sneak it past the American people without them knowing it, so it even compounds the dishonesty. That’s what I think.”