Editor Note: Demand-Side Management (DSM) is an electric-utility program where all ratepayers subsidize the energy conservation investments of those ratepayers who participate in the program. Dan Simmons, director of state affairs for the American Energy Alliance and for the Institute for Energy Research in Washington, D.C., submitted the following testimony in opposition to Georgia Power Company’s request to implement a DSM program.
Summary from Testimony: Market vs. Non-Market Conservation
Advocates of demand side management frequently overlook the human dimension. People make conservation decisions every day. Families are constantly striving to maximize the benefits they receive from using energy with the cost of using that energy.
Some economic analyses try to argue that ratepayers systematically misestimate the proper discount rate and therefore DSM is required to fix this error. But those analyses fall victim to assuming they know what’s best for ratepayers.…
Continue Reading“We’re trying to minimize the package,” [Sen. John] Kerry said yesterday of the 987-page bill. “We’re trying to keep it simple. We’re trying to keep it transparent and open and understandable for why something took place.”
– Darren Samuelsohn, “Kerry-Lieberman Bill Uses ‘Fewer Buckets’ in Giving Out Highly Prized Allowances,” E&E News, May 14, 2010.
“One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.”
– Jacques Derrida, quoted in Mitchell Stephens, “Deconstructing Jacques Derrida; The Most Reviled Professor in the World Defends His Diabolically Difficult Theory,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 21, 1991.
The late postmodern philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) would find intellectual kinship in the political debates about climate and energy coming from the party in power. If alive today, Derrida would nod approvingly at Senator John Kerry’s above I-say-it, it-is-true inversion of reality.…
Continue ReadingThe wonderful “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money” statement attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen may be apocryphal, but it remains a prescient warning to our nation’s leaders. At a time when Congress is throwing billions of dollars around like pocket change based on claims of scientists and engineers, a real quote of Dirksen may be equally important (Congressional Record: June 16, 1965, p. 13884):
… Continue ReadingOne time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat fell in a well 100 feet deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the well?