“The subsidies distort the energy market, and unless we can get that under control, the chance of ever lowering … or capping electrical rates for all Kansans will be impossible.”
“The estimated cost of decommissioning the current batch of turbines is around $4 Billion dollars. And with the expansion of solar facilities, the cost will be even higher. Who will pay for that? The state? The counties? The landowners? The wind companies? Nobody knows…”
The federal Production Tax Credit for industrial wind turbines (extended 13 times since 1992) gets much of the credit for birthing and expanding a wholly unnecessary, environmentally invasive industry. But state tax favors compound the distortion, turning uneconomic, inferior energies into profit-makers.
Here is the story of Kansas’s state property tax exemption for industrial wind turbines as told by Kansas Senator Mike Thompson (District 10).…
“Chris Tomlinson is financially conflicted, badly so, and over-the-top against Big Oil and the fossil-fuel industry writ large. Yet he has a happy home as the business editorialist at the Houston Chronicle. These are peculiar times of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation….”
What’s the latest from the oil and gas misanthrope Chris Tomlinson, business editorialist at the Houston Chronicle? The fellow that does not feel at the least conflicted swimming in taxpayer-enabled wind/solar monies inside his own abode (involving $2.0 billion and 2,000 MW)? [1]
Not much….
At CERAWeek 2022, Tomlinson was not listening to the (puppet) head of the U.S. Department of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, who stated:
…We are on a war footing—an emergency—and we have to responsibly increase short-term [oil and gas] supply…. And that means you producing more right now, where and if you can.
“We are on a war footing—an emergency—and we have to responsibly increase short-term [oil and gas] supply…. And that means you producing more right now, where and if you can.” (Secretary Granholm, March 9, 2022)
“Believe me, it would take a fool to not see that this empress has no clothes.” (RLB, below)
I have been in the business of criticizing the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) ever since it was created in 1977. And I have never read a more fanciful and pitiful speech than this one. Yes, it is very well written (whoever the speechwriter was). But how do you square the circle; and how do you eat your cake and have it too?
We are in a climate crisis, right? It is an “existential threat,” states President Biden.…