California’s environmentalist leadership is so desperate to go green that regulators will approve any renewable energy project with a high chance of being completed. Cost doesn’t matter. Nor must the project be necessary to meet the state’s renewable energy goals. The only criterion that counts is feasibility. If you can build it, state officials will approve it.
This is an outrageously low bar, yet it was the precedent set last week, when the California Public Utilities Commission, by a 4 to 1 vote, approved a 25-year contract for Pacific Gas and Electric to buy electricity generated by the Mojave Solar project, a 250-megawatt solar power plant that will soon break ground in San Bernardino County.
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News You Can Use
Oil and Gas Sector Is Driving Job Growth
According to a recent report by economics consulting firm EMSI, nine of the top eleven fast-growing jobs in the nation are in the oil and gas sector. The cause of the job growth is high demand for hydrocarbon energy and also technological breakthroughs in drilling (primarily hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking”).
On October 19th, a handful of American solar panel manufacturers petitioned the Commerce Department asking for the imposition of trade tariffs on their competitors in China. In response to this petition, the Commerce Department on Wednesday agreed to investigate whether China’s trade practices in the solar sector violate international law.
There are many stupid environmentalist talking points, but the stupidest is that the Chinese government is undercutting the growth of America’s solar power manufacturing industry. According to this line of reasoning, generous state subsidies allow Chinese solar panel manufacturers to dump their products onto the American market at artificially low prices.
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This blog has kept a close eye on the Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive expansion of its own authority (see here and here). The latest such power grab is taking place in the western United States, where the EPA is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. These Franken-regs are being used to trump the states’ rightful authority on visibility-improvement policy and impose billions of dollars of emissions controls for benefits that are literally invisible.
In 1977 and 1990, Congress passed amendments to the Clean Air Act providing that states work together to improve visibility at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. Together, these amendments are known as the Regional Haze provision. Notably, this provision accords states a uniquely high degree of control relative to the EPA. According to the EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze implementation guidelines, “[T]he [Clean Air] Act and legislative history indicate that Congress evinced a special concern with insuring that States would be the decision-makers” on visibility-improvement policy making. The courts, too, have interpreted the Clean Air Act such that states have primacy on Regional Haze decision making. In the seminal case American Corn Growers v. EPA (2001), which set boundaries between the states and the EPA on Regional Haze policy, the D.C. Circuit Court remanded the EPA’s 1999 Regional Haze implementation guidelines for encroaching on states’ authority.
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As I’ve noted before, environmentalist special interests run the sleaziest attack ads in the business.
Until very recently, MoveOn.org held the dubious honor of having produced the vilest enviro attack ad. In early 2010, the far-left political advocacy group ran a television spot insinuating that three Members of the Senate (including two Democrats who are also mothers) were forcing cigarettes upon pregnant women. Their crime was to have voted to rein in the EPA’s global warming power grab.
Move On was knocked off its perch upon the sleaze heap on October 12, when Environment Ohio issued an ad suggesting that Rep. Steve Stivers (Ohio) FED A BABY WITH A GERBER JAR FULL OF MERCURY. I’m not kidding! See for yourself.
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Gov. Perry’s Energy Speech
Vance Ginn, Master Resource, 18 October 2011
“Absurd” Green Targets Driving Business Abroad
James Chapman, Ruth Sunderland, & Sean Poulter, Daily Mail, 18 October 2011
Electric Car Chargers Idling
Drew Thornley, Planet Gore, 17 October 2011
Green Policies Are Regressive
Lisa Margonelli, Slate, 17 October 2011
Government Support for Solar Remains an Economic Drag
Lachlan Markay, Scribe, 17 October 2011
On November 16, the EPA is expected to publish a final regulation setting Maximum Achievable Control Technology for coal-fired power plants (the “Utility MACT”). It would be the most expensive regulation, ever. According to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, the price tag is as much as $100 billion a year. Coal supplies almost 50% of America’s electricity, yet there isn’t a single coal-fired power plant in the country that currently meets the standards set forth by the regulation. Outrageously, the EPA’s primary justification for the Utility MACT is to protect America’s supposed population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen from mercury.
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Many influential opinion-makers, including former Vice President Al Gore, contend that President Barack Obama last week rolled back the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed ozone regulation due to reasons of political expediency.
To me, this mainstream thinking makes sense. The rule likely would have put virtually the whole of the country into non-attainment of the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone, and compliance costs would have been obscene. This being the campaign silly season, it stands to reason that the President didn’t want to be perceived by voters as kicking a down economy
At the New York Times website, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has challenged this conventional wisdom. According to Krugman, Al Gore and his ilk are way off-base, because the ozone rule, far from being an economic depressant, is actually an economic stimulus.
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In a previous post, I explained how the Environmental Protection Agency seems to have designed the recently finalized Cross-State Air Pollution Rule to be uniquely onerous for Texas. I wrote,
Texas was excluded from the proposed [Cross-State] rule. In the final rule, however, Texas was included, due to the supposed need to slightly reduce emissions as monitored 500 miles away in Madison County, Ill.—a locale that meets the EPA air-quality standards in question. The EPA ordered the Lone Star State to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions 47 % within 6 months, despite the fact that it takes 3 years to install sulfur “scrubber” retrofits on coal-fired power plants.
Luminant, the largest merchant power producer in Texas, called the EPA’s timeline “unprecedented” and “impossible.” It suggested that the only way to achieve the reductions, and thereby avoid costly penalties, would be to shut down power production.
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