“‘I will always put the needs of our country first,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘That is why we are withdrawing from one-sided international deals,’ he added, citing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris agreement.”
– Lisa Friedman, “New Talks on Paris Pact Are Set, and That’s Awkward for U.S..” New York Times, October 18, 2017.
” The president made a tremendously courageous decision by saying we’re going to get out of the Paris accord, put America first, and make sure that we lead with action and not words.”
– Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator, “Trump EPA Chief Charts a New Course: An Interview with Scott Pruitt.” Daily Signal, October 20, 2017.
It is time for the realists, the cooler heads, to play offense after playing defense on climate and energy issues.…
Continue Reading“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”
– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich (1971) [1]
Doom and gloom—repeatedly falsified—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s start-to-finish science advisor. Back at Harvard University, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy has been been quiet. He avoided making specific, apocalyptic predictions during his Obama years (January 2009– January 2017) and has rarely made the news since. But his many written and spoken statements beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.
Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest man in Boston/Cape Cod on this day.
Read—but don’t be frightened.…
Continue Reading“Market conditions back in 1992 no longer exist. Big wind no longer needs the Production Tax Credit, and certainly cannot justify the extraordinary benefits received [3.5¢/kWh pre-tax]. Retaining the subsidy in light of lower installation costs and increased production serves only to further distort the market and bestow a bounty on big wind that far exceeds what 1992 lawmakers could ever have envisioned.”
The American Wind Energy Association’s latest market report touts an industrial- wind-energy construction pipeline of 29,634 megawatts, that, if all built, will bring the US installed capacity to nearly 115,000 MW. Installed capacity stands at 85,000 MW today.
You can bet that all (or most) of the new megawatts will meet the Obama/IRS requirements for full-tax credit eligibility. As we’ve written before, the Production Tax Credit ‘phase-out’ was little more than a 5-year extension of the PTC after Congress looked the other way while the IRS implemented its own definition of the phase-out.…
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