“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”
“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”
– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.
It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…
Continue Reading“Veterans of earlier crises, economists prominently among them, suspected another rebirth of Malthusian fear and asked how [global warming] differed from the last several.”
– Robert Fri, “Global Warming: A Policymaker’s Dilemma” (President’s Report). Resources for the Future: 1988 Annual Report, pp. 6–7.
“The accumulation of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is slowly raising the global temperature and disrupting climate patterns, with implications for economic stability worldwide. Research and analysis at RFF supports informed policy design and negotiations to address climate change on national and international levels.”
– Resources for the Future website (2016).
Oh how Resources for the Future (RFF) has bought entirely into climate alarmism and forced energy transformation for fun and profit. The two quotations above, a quarter century apart, say much.
I was reminded of old-versus-new RFF by its press release last week tied to President Obama’s final state of the union speech.…
Continue Reading“Industrial wind is a NET LOSER: economically, technically, environmentally, and civilly – no matter where it is sited.”
Thanks to crony capitalism between both major political parties and wind developers, the federal wind Production Tax Credit was extended for the 7th time for this ‘infant’ industry (for a history of the first six extensions, see here). As a result, Big Wind LLCs continue to target Western, Central, and Upstate New York. And so the multi-decade grass roots backlash against Big Wind rages on.
One battleground is on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Despite overwhelming community opposition, APEX hopes to blight these shores (a major migratory flyway) throughout the Towns of Somerset and Yates (Niagra and Orleans Counties respectively) with 620-foot-tall industrial wind turbines. These massive turbines would be the largest land-based wind turbines in the U.S.…
Continue Reading