“Although biomass is a renewable resource, much of it is currently used in ways that are neither renewable nor sustainable.”
– Christopher Flavin and Nicholas Lenssen (Worldwatch Institute), Power Surge. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994, pp. 176–77.
“We write to raise strong concerns about the November 19th, 2014, memo from Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Janet McCabe (McCabe memo), which would credit use of woody biomass for energy with reducing emissions, when it actually increases them…. Burning biomass instead of fossil fuels does not reduce the carbon emitted by power plants. In fact, as EPA itself acknowledges, burning biomass degrades facility efficiency and increases day-to-day emissions over emissions when fossil fuels are burned alone.”
– Letter from Dr. Viney P. Aneja et al. to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, February 9, 2015 (reprinted below).…
Editor note: Yesterday’s post summarized The American Energy Renaissance Act of 2014, introduced by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) and Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Ok) last year. Today’s post summarizes a model bill authored by the Institute for Energy Research/American Energy Alliance several years ago. The logic of free-market policy does not change but becomes stronger with time and change. But judge for yourself–and add (in comments) any suggestions you might have.
The Obama Administration has been implementing an anti-energy agenda since becoming President. For the last six years, Obama’s “dream ‘green’ team” has worked to increase the cost of traditional energy to reduce usage and try to make uneconomic consumer-rejected energy (wind, solar, ethanol, electric vehicles) more economic.
Even before Obama, multiple-hundred-page interventionist legislation has been signed time and again by Republican presidents.…
“[This legislation] will prevent federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing, facilitate the expansion of domestic refining capacity, improve processes to develop energy infrastructure, stop EPA overreach and its war on coal, force Congress and the President to approve any new EPA regulations that kill jobs, broaden energy development on federal land, open offshore exploration, expand U.S. energy exports, and dedicate additional revenues to debt reduction.”
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,” wrote Milton Friedman in the 40th anniversary edition of his classic Capitalism & Freedom (1962, 2002). The revered free-market economist continued:
…When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable” (p.