Archive

Archive for the ‘royalties’ Category

Breaking the impasse on ANWR and OCS (Part III): WSJ op-ed supports Alaska-style direct pass-through of royalties from oil/gas produced from OCS leases

September 8th, 2008 No comments

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by James P. Lucier, Jr., a managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, LLC, in Washington, D.C.

Lucier`s piece describes how Alaska shares its oil revenues with residents, and suggests that John McCain adopt a page from Alaska`s book to get popular support for oil and gas drilling in the OCS (on top of revenue sharing with the relevant states).  Here are Lucier’s key points:

this year every Alaskan will receive a $1,200 check as a share of the oil bonanza. (The check comes in addition to the
approximately $2,000 every Alaskan will receive this year as a dividend from the Permanent Fund, which was established by state constitutional
amendment in 1976 as a way of sharing the state’s mineral wealth with the people.)

A direct share in oil profits for every citizen is the ultimate incentive for more drilling. That’s why in Alaska drilling for
oil seems almost universally popular, while other states are drill-phobic.

The real comparison is …  between Alaska’s constitutional rule — that the people must share
directly in the state’s mineral wealth — and Mr. McCain’s proposal that coastal states should share in federal offshore oil revenue. His
plan is for the funds to be used for public purposes like roads, schools and conservation. A share of royalties dramatically improves
the coastal states’ incentive to support drilling. But if Mr. McCain offered every individual American a royalty check too, he might find it
easier to sell his program.

(emphasis added)

As I’ve previously noted, this makes eminent sense to me!

Let`s hope this good idea for royalty-sharing snowballs.  It`s something alot of people could get behind, even enviros – and if extended could vastly improve federal land management and could as well point the way to a rebated carbon tax.

Categories: ANWR, carbon pricing, Lucier, OCS, oil, royalties Tags:

Solar vs. deserts; or how "public" ownership of resources produces zero-sum political fights over preferences

September 1st, 2008 No comments

Ron Bailey, Science Correspondent of Reason Online, reported recently “how some environmental
groups are fighting the development of utility-scale solar power in the
Mojave Desert.”

As I have posted elsewhere on the role our government plays in compounding our disputes over differing preferences, I copy my comments on Bailey’s thread here:

TokyoTom | August 18, 2008, 6:34am | #

The
real problem with many of these environmental fights is that either
governments own the resources or the economic actor is highly
regulated.
With the deserts privatized and freer markets, we’d see
solar if it made economic sense (including the costs of paying off
nimby-ists).

While we are unlike to see complete privatization of state or federal
lands, we’d see greater citizen enthusiasm if the states and the feds
would be so kind as to rebate a hefty chuck of the land-use royatly
payments to us (with a cut to the related bureacrats
to incentivize
them to get good rates and to make sure proceeds are actually
collected; citizens and public prosecutors would be similarly
ncentivized).

It is the lack of sufficient revenue sharing by a greedy federal
government that has led state governors to block further OCS leasing,
and has given enviros no incentives to agree on ANWR drilling
(as I
note in the linked blog post).

Likewise, a rebated carbon tax would be a million times better than the
ethanol mandates, renewable mandates, the Warner Lieberman pork and the
Pickes’ ad blitz for solar hand-outs. The problem is a government that
wants to have a finger in every pie – citizens ought to be insisting on
a direct cut, instead of letting politicians direct all of the spoils

(which is the REAL cause of the constant deadlock).

(emphasis added)

Categories: AGW, ANWR, federal land, OCS, royalties, solar Tags: