As a person who likes to stay abreast of our ever-expanding government in my areas of specialization (energy and environment), I periodically survey the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to see what they are funding with my taxpayer dollars.
Imagine my surprise when I encountered a novel Request for Proposals at their National Center for Environmental Research seeking to recruit people at non-profit institutions to dredge through EPA’s databases in order to gin up new new things for the agency to worry about and possibly regulate.
Specifically,
…The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, is seeking applications proposing to use existing datasets from health studies to analyze health outcomes for which the link to air pollution is not well established, or to evaluate underlying heterogeneity in health responses among subgroups defined by susceptibility or extent and/or composition of exposure.
The wind industry is showing increasing signs of desperation as some unpleasant realities are emerging despite the unending propaganda storm from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).
Not only has it come out that Big Wind lobbied (and helped produce!) a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that slagged a Spanish study showing the epic failure of wind economics in Spain, but now, wind energy executives are admitting that they can’t obtain parts to build wind plantations unless they’re built abroad.
And, showing that hubris knows no bounds, they’re also lobbying for the U.S. to up the ante on wind, passing a renewable energy standard that would guarantee wind energy profits into the indefinite future.
According to The Hill, wind executives are engaging in a lobbying-flurry on Capitol Hill this week, going after the “Buy American” agenda that Senator Chuck Schumer is pushing with regard to renewable power projects funded with stimulus grants.…
[Editor note: This post by Kenneth P. Green and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute, is a slightly revised version that originally appeared at The American, AEI’s flagship monthly publication.]
In December 2009, economists Hector Pollitt and Chris Thoung of Cambridge Econometrics published a self-described “short” modeling exercise on an 80 percent greenhouse-gas emissions reduction by 2050 in the United Kingdom.[1] Pollitt and Thoung used the Energy-Environment-Economy Model of Europe (E3ME), which they observe has been “used for a variety of analyses including greenhouse-gas mitigation policies, incentives for industrial energy efficiency, and sustainable household consumption.”[2] The E3ME model covers 29 European countries and uses detailed data on 42 economic sectors, 41 categories of consumer goods, 12 types of fuel, and 14 emissions, including the six major greenhouse gases.…