“Households in 29 states are and will continue to see higher electricity rates, lower economic growth and, subsequently, lower standard of livings without outright repeal of these crony capitalist policies.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the nation’s largest non-partisan association of state legislators boasting more than 2,000 members from all 50 states, recently adopted a firm stance opposing misguided government intervention into the electricity market which works against affordable, reliable electricity.
ALEC’s model bill for state legislators, entitled the Electricity Freedom Act, repeals a state’s renewable energy mandate stating:
“…a renewable energy mandate is essentially a tax on consumers of electricity that forces the use of renewable energy sources beyond what would be called for by real market forces and under conditions of real competition in generation resources…”
Due in part to pressure from environmental groups and the renewable energy industry lobby, a movement began in the late 1990s and continued through the mid-2000s to enact state-based renewable energy mandates.…
Continue Reading“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.’”
– Joe Romm, quoted in Thomas Friedman, Is the Inflection Point Near?, New York Times, March 7, 2009.
“Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
—Kenneth Boulding (1970), p. 160. [1]
Are free-market optimists the dumb ones who jump off tall buildings and report that everything is fine, even breezy, on the way down? Or are those who fear, rant, and make this analogy bungee-jumping with reality?
The optimists have been jumping off buildings ever since Robert Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on Population was published in 1798–and not hitting the ground.…
Continue ReadingThe anti-industrial “green” movement, which once played nice with natural gas, is at war against hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Peak gas fears may be gone, and parasitic wind energy would crash without gas-fired generation to fill in, but an anti-energy agenda rules. What should be good news is parlayed into bad by the enemies of modernism.
Technology Jump–Societal Benefits
Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have boosted shale gas production from zero a few years ago to 10% of all U.S. energy supplies in 2012, observes energy analyst Daniel Yergin. Fracing has also increased U.S. oil production 25% since 2008 – almost all on state and private lands, and in the face of more federal land and resource withdrawals, permitting delays and declining public land production.
In the process, the fracing revolution created 1.7 million jobs in oil fields, equipment manufacturing, legal and information technology services, and other sectors.…
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