For Still-Poor China, Coal Pollution from Home Heating
By Greg Rehmke -- February 14, 2017Rapid industrialization spilled pollution across China’s cities, rivers, and skies. Market-reforms in the 1980s opened first agriculture and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) like Shenzhen to local enterprise and overseas investors. Market reforms and factories then expanded across China, bringing prosperity but also pollution from mining and manufacturing. Through the first decades of reform, pollution seemed far less important than jobs when wage rates even in 1990 yielded an average income per person (GNI) of just $330 a year. By 2000, average income had nearly tripled but was still just $940 a year, and by 2015, average income was nearly eight times higher than that–$7,930.
Hundreds of millions migrated from rural China to new assembly plants and textile mills. An estimated 200 million migrant workers still form the “floating population” of informal labor.…
Continue ReadingRetire the Phony ‘Social Cost of Carbon’
By Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen -- February 13, 2017“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”
“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”
The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.
While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…
Continue ReadingWind PTC: End the 4-Year Development Window (IRS guidance reversible) [Part II]
By Lisa Linowes -- February 10, 2017“The IRS expanded the two-year development window to four years [from two years to give] … developers countless ways in which to secure the full PTC and never experience the phased-down PTC in the years 2017, 2018, and 2019.”
“One of the first actions by the new administration should be to withdraw and revise IRS notice 2016-31 and change the ‘Continuity Safe Harbor’ to a 2-year period. In addition, we recommend that the controversial elements of the IRS’s ‘start construction’ rules be subject to public review under the Administrative Procedures Act. Lastly, the Congress should … repeal tax credits for wind energy facilities and eliminate Section 45 of the internal revenue code of 1986.”
This essay is the second in a series aimed at exposing abuses by the Obama administration in its effort to force wind power on the public.…
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