This is my blog: Right in Front of Our Noses or rifoon.com. I am blogging about overlooked solutions to thorny public policy issues. Sometimes the public conversation on policy wanders deep into the weeds, misses the forest for the trees or relies on expert opinion inconsistent with basic facts and logic. And, sometimes the path forward already exists, waiting for us to take it. We need only recognize the answer when we see it. Sometimes, in fact, it’s Right in Front of Our Noses. Please join the conversation. To kick off this effort, I am posting my views on two issues approachable in the same way. Heads will be scratched doubting these issues are related. I hope to cure the itch.
The two issues are: 1) Moving the Renewable Fuel Standard Point of Obligation and 2) Regulating CO2 Emissions. The first issue is totally abstruse, arcane and complicated. It is NOT recommended for light cocktail conversation. The second may determine the survival of our species for a reason more important than climate change. I hope my skills are sufficient to explain, even if you disagree, why I believe an obvious solution exists. I will devote a page to each issue. If, with your help, the conversation expands to other matters with obvious solutions, more pages will be added. I promise. Finally, you have my deepest thanks for reading this blog.

My name is Bob Neufeld. My career experience convinces me public policy decisions can be more influenced by credentialism and confusion than by dispassionate logical analysis. Decision-makers often forsake their own critical thinking for the safety of expert opinion without asking, “What really makes sense here?” Specifically, market-based solutions to environmental problems are endorsed simply because they carry, sometimes inaccurately, the “market” label. I am fascinated by markets’ nearly unlimited power to solve environmental problems but am concerned market dynamics may be misunderstood to the detriment of the environment, market participants and the economy. My short story is: I was born in Yankton, South Dakota in 1949. I hold a 1971 BS in chemical engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and a 1974 law degree from the University Of South Dakota School Of Law. In 1974 – 75, I clerked for the South Dakota Supreme Court after which I was an assistant attorney general representing the South Dakota Department of Environmental Protection. Later, I was Secretary of the SD Department of Water and Natural Resources. Pam, our two kids and I moved to Denver in 1986. For six years, I tried my hand at municipal finance as both investment banker and financial advisor. In 1992, I was hired by Wyoming Refining Company, one of the country’s smallest petroleum refiners, as their environmental manager. I retired as the environment and government relations vice president in 2016. During my career, I have been chairman of the Missouri River Basin Commission, Co-Chair of the Western Regional Air Partnership Mobile Sources Forum and a member of its Gasoline Sulfur Task Force. I served on EPA’s Clean Diesel Independent Review Panel and on the government relations, issues and environment committees of the Association of Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. I belong to the South Dakota Bar Association and am a member in good standing of the bars of the US Courts of Appeals for the DC and 8th Circuits and the United States Supreme Court. Pam and I love sailing. We have bareboated the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, the Turquoise Coast of Turkey and about half the Caribbean chain. I have a growing concern that ocean acidification, a direct result of CO2 emissions, is a direr and more cognizable threat to our specie’s existence than climate change, the causes of which are not always easily grasped. I fear we have but one opportunity to crack the CO2 regulation nut; I fear experts’ cap and trade and tax proposals, not sufficient to the task, distract us from a solution Right in Front of Our Noses.