A Bill To Make Soros Richer

Rules: A bill encouraging the use of natural-gas-powered vehicles will give the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases while rewarding the Democratic left's patron saint.

We like natural gas. It's the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, the U.S. has lots of it and, thanks to technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking"), we can get even more of it from the vast shale formations that dot the country.

Others like it, too, which is why a bill floating through Congress, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011 (HR 1380), or Nat Gas Act, has seen a number of Republicans joining central-planning Democrats in supporting it.

But HR 1380, sponsored at last count by 105 Democrats and 83 Republicans, is another government intervention in the free market. Instead of getting government out of the way of innovators, it would give a tax credit for up to 80% of the purchase cost of a natural gas vehicle — with a cap dependent on the car's weight, $8,000 for passenger cars and up to $64,000 for heavy trucks — to get more gas-powered vehicles on the road.

It so happens that a company called Westport Innovations is a leading provider of technology that allows engines to operate on clean-burning fuels such as compressed natural gas and would be expected to benefit from HR 1380's huge allocation of taxpayer dollars.

According to the folks at gurufocus.com, which monitors the wheeling and dealing of major investors, George Soros, the Hungarian billionaire who has made a fortune manipulating currencies among other financial shenanigans, owned 5,547,604 shares of WPRT, valued at $122 million as of March 31. That represented 1.45% of his equity portfolio and his third-largest holding.

So Soros could once again profit handsomely from U.S. energy policy determined largely by a Democratic party whose causes he has supported over the years, just as he profited from his investment in Petrobras, the state-run Brazilian oil giant.

While the administration has imposed an almost total ban on U.S. offshore drilling, the U.S. Export-Import Bank has guaranteed billions in loans to Petrobras as President Obama has encouraged its offshore drilling efforts, promising to be Brazil's best customer for oil found with the help of our money.

As of May 24, Soros' fund owned 1.1 million shares of Petrobras. He sold out of Petrobras in mid-2010 only to return the fourth quarter of 2010 with the purchase of roughly 588,000 shares.

Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity points out that aside from making Soros richer, the Nat Gas Act serves as a Trojan horse for the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to shut down domestic energy development and impose a backdoor cap-and-trade system via regulations.

EPA has sought to regulate so-called greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act and has ruled that carbon dioxide, the product of human respiration, is a "dangerous pollutant" that's within its authority to regulate, though Congress has explicitly said this is not the case. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed with the agency.

HR 1380 effectively puts an end to all challenges to the EPA's regulatory dictates in a section (403) that says EPA "regulations should take into account the petroleum reductions provided by such vehicles and also quantify all greenhouse-gas emission reductions." As such, HR 1380 would give the unelected bureaucracy at the EPA a blank check to control all U.S. energy production and consumption.

No longer could EPA opponents claim it has no legislative backing for the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions. The already-beleaguered American people and economy will suffer, but George Soros will once again be laughing all the way to the bank.