” … there are still numerous economic and societal barriers to rapid decarbonization.”
“And it is not like wind and solar come free of environmental concerns. The sheer size of wind and solar installations needed to underpin our electricity system is significant.”
“… lower income households will bear the largest relative burdens of the higher energy costs that are likely as a result of climate policies. While there are ways of mitigating these unequal impacts, they require difficult trade-offs.”
– Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick, “Decarbonization: It Ain’t That Easy, RFF Blog Post, April 20, 2018.
A recent blog post by Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick of Resources for the Future (RFF) is unusual, even remarkable, given the institutional history of their organization. For RFF in recent decades has gone Left, way Left, for the cause of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation (see here). …
Continue Reading“Substituting CO2 taxation for existing levies is not the tax debate from the conservative/free market side. The debate is about the flat tax versus a consumption tax as fundamental tax reform. And, hypothetically, if Malthusian decarbonization were to come about, what would be revenue-neutral?”
“In Neeley’s defense, he switched sides assuming that Obama energy policy would continue at the federal level. That way, he could argue [in his lucrative new position] that a CO2 tax was the least worst policy compared to cap-and-trade and existing command-and-control (still a weak argument). But Trump won, and the tide went out… [leaving] Neeley exposed an energy/climate progressive (statist).”
“The conservative/libertarian position is to not price or otherwise regulate carbon dioxide. Eliminate intervention, do not introduce it. Reject Mathusianism’s ultimately anti-humanistic, deep-ecology worldview.”
In “Confessions of a former Carbon Tax Skeptic,” Josiah Neeley of the pretend free-market R Street Institute, pens his latest case for supporting a federal tax on carbon dioxide (CO2).…
Continue Reading“There is also an oft ignored consideration for the ultimate number of wind and solar installations to be built and operate: a complete fleet turnover would be needed four or five times a century.”
Note: This report analyzes the output of renewable-electricity sources in the U.S. for the last twenty years. It is based on data published in annual reports of the Department of Energy (DoE).[1] The listed numerical values for power have been converted here to just one unit, the watt (W) accompanied by the international symbol for billion (G). Using just the GW* makes numerical comparisons straightforward throughout the article.
The Department of Energy (DOE) lists six renewable sources: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal, where “Solar” implies the combined output of both photovoltaic and concentrated-solar power plants.…
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