“The costs of the PTC overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits. Lawmakers should prioritize American households over wind industry lobbyists.”
– Institute for Energy Research, The Case Against the Wind Tax Credit, November 24, 2014.
Last week, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), the advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research, began a grassroots initiative to engage lawmakers about the need to reject attempts to revive the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), “a decades-old subsidy that props up the wind industry and lines the pockets of wealthy investors at the expense of the American taxpayer.”
The call-to-action via digital and social media advertisements involves nine states: Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina, Utah, California, and Louisiana.
“President Obama said his policies were on the ballot this November and the American people rejected them,” stated Tom Pyle, AEA President.…
“Pioneering inventors, risk-taking wealth creators, and visionary organizers of people and tools are among society’s greatest heroes. Those whose business is the forcible redistribution of those heroes’ achievements are engaged in immoral, envious, demagogic, or otherwise anti-social behavior.”
Lawrence W. “Larry” Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), penned an article that is even more relevant today than when it was penned in 2009. It is a remembrance, if not a call to action, about what makes social coordination and prosperity possible in a complex world.
This Thursday, may the nation give thanks to economic freedom as key to political freedom and the prosperity and blessings that we all enjoy.
Reed’s essay, “Believers in Freedom Must Not Take Liberty for Granted,” follows.
…FEE’s vision—the ideal we are striving to achieve—is a world where people flourish in a free and civil society.
“Tax credits have been essential to the economic viability of wind farms so far, but will not be needed within a few years.”
– Christopher Flavin, “Electricity’s Future: The Shift to Efficiency and Small-Scale Power,” Worldwatch Paper 61, Worldwatch Institute, November 1984, p. 35.
“Wind is competitive in more and more markets. But anytime there is uncertainty about the production tax credit, it all stops.”
– Letha Tawney, Worldwatch Institute. Quoted in Eduardo Porter, “A Carbon Tax Could Bolster Green Energy,” New York Times, November 19, 2014.
Christopher Flavin, president emeritus of the Worldwatch Institute, please call your office. Letha Tawney, Acting Director of the Charge Initiative, the Worldwatch Institute’s “signature renewable energy initiative,” please call your office.
The two of you need to conference. Thirty years ago, one of you said that wind power was ready to go it alone, to break away from the taxpayer.…