“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”
“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”
The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.
While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…
Continue Reading“The IRS expanded the two-year development window to four years [from two years to give] … developers countless ways in which to secure the full PTC and never experience the phased-down PTC in the years 2017, 2018, and 2019.”
“One of the first actions by the new administration should be to withdraw and revise IRS notice 2016-31 and change the ‘Continuity Safe Harbor’ to a 2-year period. In addition, we recommend that the controversial elements of the IRS’s ‘start construction’ rules be subject to public review under the Administrative Procedures Act. Lastly, the Congress should … repeal tax credits for wind energy facilities and eliminate Section 45 of the internal revenue code of 1986.”
This essay is the second in a series aimed at exposing abuses by the Obama administration in its effort to force wind power on the public.…
Continue Reading“Statements from Physicians for Human Rights and from Human Rights First are long overdue. Despite the enormity of its victims’ suffering, the Wind Scam is off limits for most of those who have become famous for speaking out for social justice and human rights.”
“Dismissing or denying Big Wind’s serious health impacts is akin to presenting tobacco as harmless because we profit from it or enjoy smoking. Hardwired into every environmental impact statement should be a Surgeon General’s Warning: Industrial wind turbines present a significant human health hazard to those residing within 1.25 miles or more!”
[This post completes a three-part series: Part I: The General Problem and Part II: Nina Pierpont and the ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’]
How did we get to this point?
Energized by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, federal and state grants, energy tax credits, subsidies and mandates spurred a stampede toward an artificial market for wind-generated electricity.…
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