Friends,

In this week’s edition of The Charge, we bring you the CECE’s latest event “The Big Government Car Theft” discussing how President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to cripple the U.S. auto industry and your transportation freedom with its latest tailpipe rule; we discuss nuclear energy safety and regulation; and we confront the mistaken notion that capitalism and good environmental stewardship are at odds with one another.

We continue our “Ask the Experts” series, featuring Andrew Hale, Heritage’s Jay Van Andel Senior Policy Analyst in Trade Policy, as he offers keen insight on the latest partnership announced recently by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and President Biden.

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The CECE Team

(Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment)

For more information, please contact us at CECE.info@heritage.org.

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featuring Steven Bradbury, The Heritage Foundation; Donna Jackson,

Project 21; and Mike McKenna, The Heritage Foundation

Q: Why has Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the U.K.’s so-called Conservative government hitched its wagon to the worst environmental policies of the Biden Administration?

A: There is very little difference in policy between the Conservative Party under Rishi Sunak and Biden’s Democrats. If there is any difference, the Conservative Party is now further to the left with its new 25 percent corporation tax and households saddled with the highest overall tax burden since Clement Attlee’s socialist government in the late 1940s. The Conservative Party has become a woke social-democratic party worshiping the new pagan religion of radical environmentalism. That partly explains the recent love-in at the White House between Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden.

Last week, the British and American administrations signed the Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First Century U.S.-U.K. Economic Partnership, which committed the two countries to enhance their “cooperation to accelerate clean energy transition.” Climate change dogma has become entrenched under successive Conservative administrations in academia and the public sector to the extent that lip service to such dogma is now a prerequisite for any public job. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rules have even been written into the remit of the U.K.’s central bank. Sunak has committed the U.K. to net-zero carbon emission by 2050, which is completely unachievable, and such attempts will prove ruinous to the U.K. Already, despite demands for more domestic oil production, North Sea oil and gas producers in Scotland are cutting jobs and reducing investment due to the punitive U.K. tax regime on energy profits. A special 30 percent rate of the corporation tax known as the Ring Fence Corporation Tax applies to companies involved in the exploration of oil and gas in the U.K. and the U.K. Continental Shelf. Fortunately, the new Atlantic Declaration is not a free trade agreement, but a mere list of intentions that can be ignored and forgotten after Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak are both voted out of office next year.

—Andrew Hale, Jay Van Andel Senior Policy Analyst in Trade Policy, Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation

The Power Hour | Diving Deep into Nuclear Safety and Regulation with American Nuclear Society CEO, Craig Piercy

In this week’s episode of The Power Hour, hosts Jack Spencer, Travis Fisher, and Rachael Wilfong talk with Craig Piercy, nuclear energy policy expert and CEO of the American Nuclear Society. We carry forward our nuclear energy conversation this week with deep dives on nuclear safety and regulation. If you want to know the truth about nuclear energy safety and how the industry is regulated, you don’t want to miss this one.

President Biden’s Plan to Phase Out Gas-Powered Cars Is All Pain for Consumers and No Gain

The Biden regime continues its advance toward full electrification of the U.S. auto fleet with the EPA’s latest tailpipe rule, and CECE director Diana Furchtgott-Roth details the increase in government control, environmental degradation, and human rights violations that are certain to follow if the regulation becomes finalized, in her latest op-ed for The Hill.

The proposed EPA rule would require 67 percent of new auto sales in the U.S. to consist of electric vehicles (EVs) by 2032, a 61 percent increase from today’s numbers. But to order by bureaucratic decree such a massive shift in the auto market will come with great consequences: Car prices will skyrocket (as EVs are significantly more expensive), electricity prices will rise because of increased demand on the grid, and human rights violations will increase in the developing world through raw-material mining and battery manufacturing in Africa and China, all the while having no discernable positive impact on the environment.

This regulation will impose substantial costs on poor and middle-income people, harm the economy, embolden adversaries, such as China, and restrict everyday Americans’ ability to travel, all in the name of achieving certain climate “goals” that will not have any real effect on the environment. In other words, the EPA is more than willing to make Americans’ lives harder while offering them no worthwhile tradeoff.

Why Capitalism Is Better for Nature, the Environment Than Socialism

Talk of corporate greed and capitalism itself being the cause of a supposedly impending environmental catastrophe abounds and is preached far and wide by people like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but John Stossel questions the truth of that accusation.

Stossel interviewed Tom Palmer from the Atlas Network, who argued that the truth is the inverse of what we commonly hear. Palmer, for example, points to Mao Zedong’s infamous policy of killing all sparrows because they ate some of the grain growing on the farms. The people were mobilized to kill all the sparrows they could find, and they succeeded in nearly wiping out the species. However, in addition to snacking on some grain, much of a sparrow’s diet consists of eating insects, such as locusts. Since the locusts’ natural predator had been all but eradicated they were free to multiply, descend on the collective farms, and destroy vast swaths of crops, contributing to China’s terrible famine that killed tens of millions of people. This is just one of many examples of central planning harming the environment, but the real history behind socialism’s effect on the earth has been nearly as eradicated as the sparrows in Mao’s China.

Capitalism, on the other hand, often leads to environmental protection as private farmers have a vested interest in protecting the quality of their land for the simple reason of being able to grow crops year over year. Additionally, as capitalist societies advance over time and per capita incomes increase past the threshold of immediate survival people can shift their thinking to matters in the longer term, such as good environmental stewardship. Put differently, the ability to even worry about air and water quality is a luxury concern for developed capitalist countries.

“Driving Bad Policy: Examining EPA’s Tailpipe Emissions Rules and the Realities of a Rapid Electric Vehicle Transition”

Below is an excerpt from Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow Steven Bradbury’s recent congressional testimony addressing the dangers of the EPA’s latest emissions standards rule:

“If and when the American people feel the true effects of these rules—when they lose the vehicle options they love at the local dealership and find themselves stuck driving older and less safe cars, when the bottom falls out of the job market in the U.S. auto industry, when drivers cannot find convenient charging stations for their electric vehicles—in sum, when American voters realize what the EPA’s far reaching regulatory enterprise has wrought for the nation, they will be angry. They will look to their elected leaders for answers, including the Members of Congress. They will not look to the all-wise regulators of the EPA. At issue are matters of life, liberty, and prosperity, and they are fundamentally political in nature. That is exactly why, under our constitutional republic, it is for Congress, and Congress alone, to make the monumental decisions that the EPA is purporting to take upon itself in these proposed rules.”

Read the full testimony here.