Can’t Pass Cap-and-Trade? Shift to Close-and-Prosecute

posted at 4:57 pm on April 30, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Cronyism ]   

The events of this spring in the fossil fuel industry are so much a leftist’s Impossible Dream that it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to believe in them as unforced coincidence.

The mine disaster in West Virginia was a terrible thing, in which 29 people died. Now an FBI probe has been announced:  of Massey Energy, for alleged bribery of federal safety officials.

In the wake of the awful oil rig explosion, which took 11 lives, this morning’s allegation is raging like wildfire across the blogosphere:  that the explosion will be blamed on – you guessed it – Halliburton.

The bribery-of-safety-officials-leading-to-a-mine-disaster story line is straight out of a Hollywood script.  It scratches multiple itches:  it’s the kind of thing leftists want desperately to believe is simply always going on, and it’s an oblique, second-order approach to discrediting the industry and the role it fills in our economy.  The demonization of Halliburton, in a sort of efficient multitasking, can perform a similar function, while it also keeps the pressure up on old Dick Cheney, that Hieronymus Bosch caricature of an entrail-eating public official.

The political cost of confronting the coal industry head-on – confronting it in principle, as a fossil-fuel industry – would be very high.  Coal employs a lot of Americans, and a whole lot more Americans depend on it for their energy needs.  The average American doesn’t hate coal, and doesn’t hate “Big Coal.”  Most of us don’t run around either foaming at the mouth over oil, Big Oil, or Halliburton and its oil rig service division.

But smear the industry with the implication of greed, vice, and negligence, and depict those qualities as endemic to “capitalist enterprise,” and the media pundits and the entertainment industry will do the rest.  How, they will demand, can we let this terrible “system” take lives and destroy the world around us?  Look for Feathery Vengeance:  Canaries Take Back the Coal Mine in 2012.  Finny Vengeance: The Halibut-Halliburton Smackdown, can’t be far behind.

But the federal government isn’t waiting for Big Entertainment to soften us up.  It’s Sammy-on-the-spot with the shining sword, swept dramatically, with that satisfying metal-on-metal whoosh, from the Government Fix-It Scabbard.  Here’s how the feds are proceeding, right now and without any clamor from you:

The nation’s top mine safety official told lawmakers earlier this week that the government will start going directly to federal court to shut down mines that make a habit of ignoring safety.

Joe Main, director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said his agency has had the power to seek federal injunctions for years, but has never tried to use it.

“I can’t speak for past administrations,” Main said during the Senate’s first hearing on the accident that killed 29 men. “We’re going to use it.”

Utility prices, as Obama himself promised, “would necessarily skyrocket.”

As they will with the moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf – the moratorium for American leases, that is.  China and Russia won’t be ceasing to drill in the Gulf.

It is a dreadful sense:  that every communication from the authorities needs to be inspected for its ulterior purpose.  In the case of the remarkably, almost unbelievably well-timed mine disaster and oil rig explosion, the federal government is already promising to curtail mining and drilling – just as Obama said he wanted to do back in 2006-8.  There’s more than one way to force Americans to pay more for energy.  Next, we can suppose, the measures will be instituted to ensure that revenue from higher prices is funneled to unions, favored businesses, and government officials.  But mines and rigs will have to close, thousands of people will lose their jobs, and prices will necessarily skyrocket.

I don’t believe, myself, that Obama’s objective is actually to get Americans to stop using fossil fuels.  Doing that would make the revenues dry up.  It would imperil union jobs and the coffers of big political donors – not to mention inflows to the federal treasury.  What Team Obama wants to do is gain control of the industry in toto, so it can decide who benefits and how much.

That’s what Cap-and-Trade was always to be:  a method of extracting arbitrary profits from people’s necessary daily activities, by controlling supply and claiming fees for demand.  It’s ultimately what Obamacare is too.  And in the latter realm, the implication that “market-based health care” is just a cesspool of negligence and greed has been an incessant theme, because the left can use it to justify government stepping in to control everything.  Analogously, the spectacle we are probably about to witness, of Massey and Halliburton in the dock being pelted with rotten fruit, constitutes a thread in the same theme about the fossil fuels industry.

To outline what it would look and feel like to have our energy industry managed by Obama or a like successor, one method is of course to look at national health care as it operates abroad.  But there’s another method, and one that is even closer to home and more discouraging.  I invoked that method in an article in January.  It’s very simple:  look at how the political crony system works in Chicago.  In June 2008, Binaymin Applebaum wrote a devastating article on that topic as it relates to the endlessly-exploited public housing program there.  There is today only the thinnest, most transparent veil of acting on behalf of the indigent or the public good, draped over the trading of favors and the raking in of profits guaranteed by the government – at the public’s expense.

In the process of American becoming Chicago writ large, the mine disaster and the oil rig explosion are crises no cronyist rent-seeker would let go to waste.

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