Category — Energy efficiency

Many analysts (including myself) have written about the innumerable problems with cap-and-trade, mostly focusing on the bogus nature of the trade. And most of the problems we’ve predicted have found their way into the current cap-and-trade law working its way through Congress, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Waxman-Markey climate bill).

As was widely predicted, Waxman-Markey has degenerated into little more than a special-interest pork-fest, where the political system is getting ready to give away at least 85% of the valuable emission permits to favored energy constituencies such as electrical utilities, university researchers, low-income households, renewable manufacturers, anti-deforestation programs, and so on. The Obama administration’s pledge to auction off 100% of the emission permits was a joke on the face of it: virtually all emission trading programs feature extensive “grandfathering” of polluters and favored constituencies.

Principled environmentalists have turned their guns on what has emerged. Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, in particular, has explained that it’s not only the trade elements of Waxman-Markey that are bogus, it’s the cap as well. It turns out that under Waxman-Markey’s byzantine provisions, “carbon emissions in regulated sectors of the U.S. economy [are] to rise at business as usual (BAU) rates through 2030.” [Read more →]

As time passes, the skepticism grows about the ability of government funding for “green jobs” to simultaneously (a) pull the economy out of recession and (b) reduce the risk of climate change.  In the March 4 edition of Slate–hardly a bastion of reactionary conservatism–Senior Fellow Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations took the greenwash off of “green jobs” in the essay, ”Barking Up the Wrong Tree: Why green jobs may not save the economy or the environment.” Levi also directs CFR’s Program on Energy Security and Climate Change. [Read more →]

The insights of William Stanley Jevons, though set down long ago, make a profound contribution to the current debate over energy efficiency and energy-conservation policy, and not just to the debate over the role of renewable energy in modern society. [Read more →]