Congress seems intent on imposing energy taxes on the American public. First, there was the proposed cap-and-trade legislation; now there’s a renewable energy standard.
While cap-and-trade legislation appears to be dead for now, the same can’t be said for a renewable energy standard. On September 21, 2010, Senator Bingaman (D-NM) introduced the Renewable Electricity Promotion Act of 2010 (S. 3813). A bipartisan group of 32 cosponsors gives this bill a legitimate chance of passage this year. At a minimum, it’s a bill that warrants significant attention.
Background
The legislation would create what is referred to as a renewable energy standard (RES). The RES is a combination of two discreet policy programs. The first is a renewable energy mandate and the second is an energy efficiency mandate.
Electric utilities would be required to meet a 15 percent RES and would have to generate at least 11 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources.…
Continue Reading“Enron also welcomed the challenge of responsible environmental stewardship, and called on industry to address the issue of global warming even as some companies feared the impact of pollution control on their bottom lines.”
– Bill White, “In These Challenging Times, Enron Deserves Our Thanks,” Houston Chronicle, October 26, 2001.
Former Houston mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Bill White is running away from his far Left energy/environmental past–one that he developed as deputy secretary of the Department of Energy in the Clinton/Gore Administration from 1993 until 1995. And when times were good and Obama cool, Houston’s mayor flaunted his climate alarmism. But no more…
White now pretends to be a fiscal conservative and no longer supports cap-and-taxtrade. But isn’t this the same fellow that as Houston mayor created new staff positions and supported high-cost energy to promote his Climate Alarmism agenda?…
Continue Reading“The people who build wind farms are not environmentalists. . . . Business is a delicate balancing act, and chief executives are always walking a tightrope between the needs of the community, their employees, and the marketplace.”
– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 454.
The front page exposé in the New York Times of another problem of industrial wind—coming on top of Robert Bryce’s eye-opening Wall Street Journal piece on air emissions relating to firming wind energy—presents another problem for Big Wind and Big Environmentalism.
Windpower’s noise problem is nothing new–it has just been swept under the rug by the industrial wind complex. The oft photoshoped pictures of wind turbines skip the sound–that would ruin the idyllic facade of the energy source that is radically uneconomic and an inferior energy source compared to conventional electricity generation.…
Continue Reading