“Carbon pollution conjures up images prior to the 1960s when coal was burned without environmental controls in electric power generation; there was train transportation and city-operated district heating systems; there was home heating and cooking with vast amounts of soot strewn over snow in the winter; and when laundry was dried outside and cars parked outside too. In reality carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels is a positive benefit to society as explained by Princeton University Emeritus Professor William Happer in The Myth of Carbon Pollution.”

British journalist Tim Montgomerie recently wrote in The Times (UK), “Our energy policy is insane: this the inconvenient truth.” I could not have found a better title for the Obama-led, and too often Republican supported, energy policies at home.

Montgomerie described the plight of those in the United Kingdom saddled with energy policies that take money from poor pensioners and give it to wealthy landowners who profit from wind farms. …

[Editor Note: Part I yesterday explained why carbon pricing cannot succeed unless it is global, and global carbon pricing is unlikely to be achieved, let alone sustained for the time until the job is done (centuries). Today’s post evaluates the output from the most widely cited and accepted climate economics model to show that at realistically likely participation rates, carbon pricing would be economically damaging for all this century, if not far beyond.]

A new report by Sir Nicholas Stern and co-authors “Better growth better climate”, released a week before the UN Climate Summit in New York (September 2014), advocates governments around the world intervene to impose carbon pricing, wind and solar power, and energy efficiency improvements. They imply the net economic costs could be negligible.

However, these claims do not seem to reconcile with results from the DICE-2013R model, developed by the highly respected and cited climate economist, William Nordhaus.…

“[T]he evidence is clear that Increased Block Pricing is a key driver behind the distributed solar PV movement in California… The first step to rationalizing California’s electricity rates is to greatly reduce or eliminate increasing-block-pricing.”

“With federal subsidies that pay nearly half the cost of PV — and net metering that pays the residential customer for electricity supplied to the grid at the retail rate rather than the wholesale rate that other renewable generation sources receive – solar PV can beat the high-tier prices of IBP. That’s why solar PV installers are the most vocal opponents of rational rate reform that would call a kilowatt-hour a kilowatt-hour regardless of how many other kilowatt-hours you consume during the month.”

— Severin Borenstein, Director, University of California Energy Institute (September 30, 2014)

Southern California Edison Rates 1999 to 2009 

Tiered electric-rate policies are driving California homeowners that use a lot of electricity into rooftop solar installations and should be ended, says one of California’s top energy experts.…

“As currently drafted, the carbon emission rates that EPA proposes for Virginia are arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.”

“Virginia’s compliance with the Proposed Regulation, as currently drafted, will be expensive and will be paid for by Virginia residents and businesses. Contrary to the claim that ‘rates will go up, but bills will go down’, experience and costs in Virginia make it extremely unlikely that either electric rates or bills in Virginia will go down as a result of the Proposed Regulation.”

“Additional near-term generator retirements caused by the Proposed Regulation will compound existing, unresolved reliability concerns in the Commonwealth.”

– Staff of the Virginia State Corporation Commission, Comments to U.S. EPA, October 14, 2014.

The anti-intellectual, postmodernist arguments for free-lunch/lunch-you-are-paid-to-eat CO2-emission reductions regulation, or in the U.S. EPA’s words, “‘rates will go up, but bills will go down,” sooner or later must hit the shoals of reality.…