My Weekly Reading for June 1, 2025

By Vance Ginn, The Daily Economy, May 23, 2025.

Excerpt:

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), gasoline prices are generally shaped by five components: crude oil prices, refining costs, distribution and marketing, taxes, and regulations. In California, taxes and regulatory costs alone account for more than $1.30 per gallon — nearly double the national average.

California has the highest gas tax in the country, at $0.678 per gallon, not including additional fees and environmental surcharges. Add in the Cap-and-Trade program, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), and boutique fuel blends that are required only in California, and it becomes clear why Californians pay more.

And things are deteriorating further. The Mische study warns that with refinery closures due to hostile permitting processes and low expected returns under California’s climate mandates, fuel supply in the state could drop by 20 percent by 2026, even as demand stays relatively stable. Fewer refineries and rigid fuel standards will mean tighter supply and higher prices.

by Jeremy Horpedahl, Cato at Liberty, May 23, 2025.

Excerpts:

President Trump, for his part, seems okay with this, and in two recent interviews he has stated that it’s fine if little girls only have 3 dolls, rather than 30. This might ring true to parents of young kids that can’t walk around the house without stepping on yet another child’s toy, but overall, this is a horrible message of degrowth. One of the main benefits of economic growth is the increasing variety and affordability of goods and services.

At some point, kids might get bored with the 300th doll, but this is not something for the government to dictate. And this is the main point: consumers are choosing to buy 30 dolls, or whatever else, because they want to and it brings them joy. Consumers can always choose to buy less on their own, but they are best situated to determine how many dolls and other toys their kids can have (even though, as a parent, this is a constant struggle!).

And:

When the Barbie movie came out in 2023, I wrote a light-hearted but still serious post about the benefits of economic growth for women and young girls. Compared to when the Barbie doll was first released in 1959, a woman in 2023 could have 3–4 times as many dolls with the same number of hours of work. Or as Chelsea Follett put it, the number of hours needed to work to buy a Barbie fell “from well over an hour to just over 12 minutes.” We should only hope that we would see this progress for goods and services more widely. And indeed, for some categories of goods, we do see this progress.

by David Hebert and Marcus Witcher, Civitas Institute, May 26, 2025.

Excerpts:

Reagan’s commitment to free trade cannot be overstated. However, we must also understand the context in which he made these decisions. The US economy, particularly the auto industry, was in a very rough spot when he took office in 1981. After decades of low gas prices, which made driving big, heavy, less fuel-efficient cars of the sort made in Detroit affordable, an oil crisis beginning in 1973 and amplifying in late 1978 hit American car drivers especially hard. The oil crisis was so severe that it kicked off a series of mini recessions in 1980 and again in 1981.

At the same time, Japan had begun exporting cars to the US, and in 1980, Japanese-made cars comprised over 20% of the US market. Their cars had three advantages over domestically produced cars: they were more fuel efficient due to their smaller size and weight-conscious construction, they were cheaper than American cars on the road, and they required significantly fewer repairs than their American counterparts. In many ways, they were superior vehicles. As a result, they were quickly supplanting US cars. Detroit’s Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler (now Stellantis) were languishing and were forced to lay off thousands of workers.

And:

The domestic automobile industry during the 1980s and 1990s illustrates this. Freed from the pressures of foreign competition, the domestic auto industry’s methods and practices calcified around the idea that Americans would purchase mid-size and large-car models. After all, while Japanese cars were still available, they were becoming harder and harder to come by. By contrast, Japanese automakers continued to invest in improving quality. By 1990, the quality gapbetween domestically made cars and Japanese cars (as measured by how frequently repairs were needed) had grown even larger.

During the 90s, the Big Three were forced to close 42 of the 63 automotive assembly plants, resulting in tens of thousands of job losses in the industry the VER was supposed to protect. The reason for this is simple and easy to understand: Japanese cars were already better and more affordable than their domestic counterparts in 1981. Because the domestic car industry squandered the opportunity to make crucial adjustments to their fleets, Americans started buying more imported cars. Rather than short-term pains begetting long-term gains, the short-term pains of higher car prices led to greater long-term pains of reduced employment.

by Benjamin Zycher, The National Interest, May 29, 2025.

Excerpts:

The climate litigation game is simple: attribute any and all damage even remotely plausible to “climate change” and then sue the fossil energy producers for purportedly causing that damage while misleading the public about those asserted impacts despite knowing about them for decades.

The claims seem straightforward, and the potential uses for the many, many billions of dollars to be extracted are endless. Alas, the game is in a slow-motion collapse, the latest manifestation of which is the decision by Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Court of Common Pleas Judge Stephen Corr to dismiss the county climate lawsuit against several energy producers. Judge Corr wrote, “… Bucks County fails to state a claim upon which relief can be granted because Pennsylvania cannot apply its own laws to claims dealing with air in its ambient or interstate aspects, and, therefore, we are compelled to dismiss this lawsuit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.” (emphasis added) And he added, “We join many other state and federal courts in finding that claims raised by Bucks County are solely within the province of federal law.”

And the two “money” paragraphs:

The response of many of the climate litigants is that the fossil energy producers have known all along that they were creating a climate crisis but hid that information from us. Seriously? Let us summarize what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 1990 First Assessment Report (page 202) made clear: It could not explain why temperatures were higher 5,000-6,000 years ago despite no evidence of an increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.

Fast forward to the most recent Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2022). The IPCC still cannot narrow down the “likely” range (p. 46) of climate effects of increased GHG concentrations and is able to predict (Table 12.12) various adverse future effects only with low confidence and only under an extreme emissions scenario. Did the fossil energy industry “know” things decades ago that were not known then and are not known today? Obviously not.

Note: I just noticed the misspelling on my pic. I’m still learning ChatGPT.