“The PTC was intended to be a temporary subsidy for a fledgling industry, but has morphed into a massive handout for large corporations, many of which are foreign owned—all at the expense of the American taxpayers. It’s a textbook case of corporate welfare…. It’s past time for the wind industry to sink or swim on its own merits.”
– Thomas Pyle (American Energy Alliance), “PTC Elimination Act Protects American Families,” April 22, 2015.
This week, Representatives Kenny Marchant and Mike Pompeo introduced H.R. 1901 to eliminate the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a subsidy for qualifying renewable energy (mainly wind power) that has been extended time and again since its enactment in 1992. The bill would tighten eligibility requirements for new wind projects, terminate the inflation adjustment provision saving taxpayers about 35 percent, and repeal the underlying statute to end all credits for existing projects by 2025.…
“Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”
– Judith Curry, Congressional testimony of April 15, 2015 (see below)
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008.
A major development in the history of the physical climate-change debate occurred when respected mainstream climatologist Judith Curry parted ways with an increasingly conflicted, even corrupted, mainstream of neo-Malthusian, Left-of-Center, rent-seeking (crony) scientists. No, the debate is not about global warming (agreed) or a human influence on climate (agreed); it is the predestined conclusion of ‘consensus’ science that any human influence on global climate is bad-to-catastrophic, not benign or positive.…
[Editor note: From time to time, MasterResource will publish excerpts from Bradley’s forthcoming book, Political Enron: A Business History, (John Wiley & Sons and Scrivener Publishing, 2016). The first two volumes of his trilogy on political capitalism, inspired by the rise and fall of Enron, are on worldview (2009) and industry background (2011).]
Enron’s two-front civil war within the fossil-fuel industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s had natural gas warring against coal on the one side and petroleum on the other. But Ken Lay’s well researched, ably orchestrated effort inspired another split, this one within the hitherto anti-fossil-fuel, anti-industrial environmental community.
“Natural gas has, until recently, tended to be lumped in with the ‘bad guys,'” wrote natural gas scribe Daniel Macey. “Now the question is whether to let natural gas into the environmental camp.”…