Category: Law

I think your question about new taxes on solar and wind is an interesting one, and increasing taxation has been an ongoing process for years.

Some of these tax increases are normal, like ending property tax exemptions. These taxes don’t impact project economics too severely, and the breaks create a lot of ill will at the local level.

Solar has seen constant tax increases and quotas on imported panels. Uncompetitive domestic producers, other competing energy sources, anti-trade folks, and China hawks all favor these taxes. The important metric is that buying panels in the US is 2x-3x more expensive per watt than in the rest of the world.

Solar panel factories are easy to build, and technology changes quickly. There is a Dutch boy and the dam effect. We constantly have to add new tariffs on different countries and new technologies (although foreign production from US-owned companies has generally been exempt). These tariffs have to get stiffer to maintain the balance.

A recent change was that the IRA finally led everyone to start building factories in the US. An absolute avalanche of panel factories is/was on the way with less activity for cells, wafers, and polysilicon. These factories might be viable without subsidies considering US panel prices. Most of the interest groups listed don’t appreciate this outcome, especially because many are Chinese-owned factories. Foreign Entity of Concern content and ownership penalties are the obvious solution as the next hole to put a finger in because many subcomponents would still be imported and the general kludge laws like that add.

The solar installation lobby has been satisfied with tax credits that counteract some of the high panel costs. These rules tend to discourage new technology in the fine print and skew incentives. Simpler, denser solar farm designs make sense once panels are cheap. There is no reason to make the switch if panels are expensive and the tax credit is based on the total install cost. Roughly 90% of US utility-scale installations have trackers that add cost but increase per panel output. In China, there are almost no trackers. There are also some nasty effects in the residential business that encourage complex financial products over streamlining construction and permitting.

It is an interesting crossroads where the tax credits are gone, and there is now a reason to have a more direct confrontation on panel cost. The battery industry is in the early stages of a similar conflict, but it seems like they might retain the deal with the devil and keep tax credits for now.

I’ve long advocated selling off some federal land—an idea that reliably causes mass fainting spells among the enlightened. How could we possibly part with our national patrimony, our land, our sacred wilderness? Calm down. Most of this “public land” is never used by the public. Selling some of it would actually make it more accessible and useful to real people.

Moreover, most of you wailing about selling some Federal land are probably very happy we sold the “public” airwaves for your private cell phone use. Privatizing the airwaves made them much more useful to the public. (Thank you Reed!).

AEI has an excellent map of the lands that could be sold and developed in the Mike Lee bill. Here’s their conclusion:

The data show a significant opportunity. Our analysis finds that developing just 135-180 square miles of the most suitable BLM land, a minuscule fraction of the total, could yield approximately 1 million new homes over ten years. This would substantially address the West’s housing shortage while generating an estimated $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury from land sales.

Here’s an example of the some of the land potentially developable around Las Vegas.

Here’s a Google satellite image of the bit around Mountain’s Edge. Enjoy your fishing on these public lands!

And here’s a very crude but useful scatter plot showing the correlation between median home prices in a state and Federal land ownership. Should home prices in Utah (63.1% Federally owned) really be 71% higher than in Texas (1.8% Federally owned)? Of course, Texas is famously an urban hellscape with no parks, no open space, and nowhere to hunt or fish.

The Federal government controls a ridiculous amount of land in the West including more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF). The vast majority of this land is NOT parks!!! It is time for a sale to raise some funds and improve the efficiency of land allocation.

The conservative Mike Lee has a bill that would allow some sales. Great! The only problem with the bill is that it is loaded down with restrictions and qualifications. For example, there is a cap of 0.75% on total sales–that’s right, the land sales are capped at less than 1% of the total Federal land and that is a high cap because most of the rules prohibit any sale. The sales that are allowed have to be nominated by state or local governments, must be adjacent to developed areas and close to infrastructure. Moreover, the land can only be use for housing. Lyman Stone has a thread going into even more detail. The very modest goal–as you can see at right–is to rationalize some checkerboard land patterns.

Even so, the bill is probably doomed. Just mentioning federal land sales triggers a moral panic, as if someone proposed auctioning off Yellowstone. Supposed conservatives like Lomez are fueling this hysteria (e.g. here, here and here). It’s nonsense. Here and here is the type of land we are actually talking about—notice the difference?

As Matt Darling pointed out, this is Everything Bagel Liberalism from Conservatives—a bloated mess of proceduralism that empowers special interests and kneecaps supply.

If we can’t even sell Federal scraps then we’ve abandoned any pretense of governing in the public interest. We should be building entirely new cities–freedom cities!–not whining about fishing and hunting on scraps of scrub. This is exactly the same as urban NIMBYs who lobby to save “historic” parking lots. Pathetic. The federal land monopoly is not sacred. Let it go. This is where the rubber hits the road: if MAGA means anything beyond vibes and grievance, it should mean cutting red tape and unlocking land for Americans to own and build upon.