“… I also know this credit won’t go on forever. It was never meant to, and it shouldn’t…. I have expressed support in the past for a responsible, multi-year phase out of the wind tax credit. But…”
– Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), an original author of the 1992 Production Tax Credit (PTC)
Special government favor has propped up solar power since the 1970s and wind power since the early 1990s. One decade turning into the next, the (not-so) “clean energy” lobby has repeatedly made promises that their technologies are, or soon will be, competitive with electricity generated from natural gas, petroleum, or coal.
Documentation of this failure is well reported here at MasterResource and by the Institute for Energy Research. This particular post reproduces in large part a 2015 piece by the American Energy Alliance (IER), “Wind Fail: 20 Quotes for 30 Years of False Hopes.”…
“Democrats and environmentalists are shifting their approach to climate change…. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines.”
– Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, New York Times (below)
It was “all of the above” on the way up, and it is “all of the above” on the way down. Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer’s “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They’re Not So Sure” (New York Times, June 11, 2026) is worth revisiting to document the sea change that has occurred in the Democrat party away from climate alarmism and forced energy transformation.
“As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change,” the article begins.…
Ethan Tan on social media shared the findings of a recent, neglected study on how China’s wind and solar push is more bark than bite. “China has a lot of renewable, zero emission power gen capacity,” he writes. “But they are mainly located too far to matter.”
He quotes from “Why Wind and Solar Power is Going to ‘Waste’ in China in the Global Energy Crisis” (South China Morning Post), which summarized a study (paywall) from Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
…The “wasted” wind and solar energy stems from inflexible grid management that continues to position coal as a stabilising source of power and stymies a clean energy expansion that could otherwise generate electricity equivalent to the needs of France, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) think tank.