“Unfortunately the [wind] industry has begun letting workers go up and down our American manufacturing supply chain…. Congress must [extend subsidies] now to give wind energy a stable business environment… to … save 37,000 American jobs by the first quarter of next year.”
– Denise Bode (AWEA), Press Release, August 9, 2012
“He who lives by a legalized sword, will perish by a legalized sword.”
– Ayn Rand, “The Moratorium on Brains II,” Ayn Rand Letter, 1971
The wind industry is imploding, and the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is providing the details. Suffice it to say that there will be no Jay Leno at the next AWEA confab.
With accumulating layoffs, extending the Production Tax Credit (PTC) is increasingly becoming too late. AWEA has been warming about 10,000 job losses by September 1, and now the number is 37,000 in the next seven or so months.…
I expected the worst when I saw that Media Matters, the communications watchdog for the Democratic Left, had profiled my recent energy speech given to 1,000-strong at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting. Still, I think it useful to rebut Media Matters’s Alexander Zaitchik whose report is reproduced with my parsed comments in blue.
———————–
MM: The agenda in Salt Lake City was heavy on energy themes. Keynoting one of the luncheons was Robert Bradley, CEO of the free-market and pro-climate change Institute for Energy Research.
Comment: “Free market” is an apt term–thank you, Sir. But “pro-climate change? I have never heard that. That tricky to equate climate change with the human influence on climate, as if natural forces were not also at work.
In rebuttal, I’ll just quote James Hansen on climate change:
…“Climate is always changing.
“We will take the vision for affordable energy, common sense regulation, and safe technology to the American people; then return to Washington D.C. to deliver the message — it’s time to free the American people from costly, unnecessary regulations and bureaucracy. It’s time for Washington to untie the hands of American energy producers and manufacturers, and free these job creators to put our country back to work again.”
Freedom rings! The anti-energy eco-planners used to monopolize the not-for-profit energy dialogue. There was yours truly running the Institute for Energy Research (IER) out of my house, and Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute carrying the free-market energy torch in Washington, D.C. And then that feisty bunch at the Competitive Enterprise Institute–Marlo Lewis and Chris Horner, et al.–came on the scene.
But now our side has caught up.…