Property Rights, Free-Markets, or SB 819?

Many bills were filed in the Texas Legislature before the March 14^th bill filing deadline, and Texas state Senator Lois Kolkhorst (SD 18) filed at least 90 (my count).

With that many bills filed, they can’t all be winners, and Sen. Kolkhorst’s SB 819 is problematic, at least if you care about things like limited government, property rights and free-markets.

SB 819 (which was rejected during the last legislative session) targets renewable energy in Texas. It should raise suspicion anytime legislation singles out an industry either for favor or disfavor, and SB 819 should raise such suspicion.

We’re troubled by this legislation NOT because of climate change hysteria, and NOT because we think that government should force us to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Because we don’t. 

We’re troubled because SB 819 violates limited government, conservative, free-market principles. 

First, SB 819 is anti-market. When a Republican says they believe in free-markets and limited government, what that means is they believe markets, rather than governments, should determine outcomes. That means government policy should be neutral toward differing technologies, differing business models, etc. Anything that can be substituted for something else should be taxed and regulated the same way. Just as cable, telecom, wireless and satellite are different technologies for accessing the Internet, oil, gas, solar, wind, nuclear and geothermal are different technologies for generating energy. Government policy (taxes and regulation) should not pick winners and losers.

Conservatives used to think it was wrong for Big Government to determine economic outcomes.

Second, SB 819 offends property rights. In Texas, if someone owns a tract of barren land in west Texas, but they have oil and gas underground, they’ve hit the lottery. The state encourages them to fully exploit that natural resource through tax and regulatory policy.

But what if someone owns a tract of barren land in west Texas and they DON’T have oil and gas underground, but they have wind and sun above ground? Are below-ground natural resources morally superior to above-ground natural resources?

Why should Texas reward the property owner with below-ground resources but hamper the property owner with above-ground resources? SB 819 does exactly that. It restricts landowners from exploiting the wind and solar resources above their property.

How? By regulating renewables to such a degree that it would be prohibitively expensive to continue to invest in renewables in Texas. And that’s not an unintended consequence—that’s the goal of the bill.

SB 819 should be rejected, at least in its present form, because it violates conservative, free-market principles.

Now, to be clear, legislation designed to restrict fossil fuels and favor renewables would violate those very same principles. We would have (and have had) the very same objections to such legislation.

But you don’t have to oppose renewables in order to support the full exploitation of our God-given resources of natural gas and oil, as Gov. Abbott’s energy policy demonstrates. One doesn’t require the other. You could, in fact, support a level playing field. What a novel idea!