A new study from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard Medical School, Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal, estimates that the negative externalities of coal-fired electricity generation are two-to-three times as great as the actual price of the electricity itself. Wow–so much for the cheap price of electricity from coal itself being a social good. And forget that decades of ever more stringent air and water regulation has internalized the so-called social cost of coal-fired power plants. And forget that carbon dioxide (CO2) has positives, not only negatives, for the biosphere.

So forgetting all this, and taking the report’s analytics at face value, it is concluded that the FULL COST of coal makes “wind, solar, and other forms of nonfossil fuel power generation … economically competitive.”…

Remember all this? America is running out of natural gas. Prices will soar, making imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) and T. Boone Pickens’ wind farm plan practical, affordable and inevitable. Well, reality intervened. We are having an energy transformation, but just the opposite of what the non-market energy planners predicted.

Shale Gas Revolution

Barely two years later, America (and the world) are tapping vast, previously undreamed-of energy riches – as drillers discover how to produce gas from shale, coal and tight sandstone formations, at reasonable cost. They do it by pumping a water, sand and proprietary chemical mixture into rocks under very high pressure, fracturing or “fracking” the formations, and keeping the cracks open, to yield trapped methane.

Within a year, U.S. recoverable shale gas reserves alone rose from 340 trillion cubic feet to 823 tcf, the Energy Department estimates.…

“Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table

 Something big just happened in Ontario–something the Wind Lobby fears. Recently, Minister of the Environment John Wilkinson held fast to what had been a “for now” moratorium policy where tough talk about environment-before-wind was followed by turbine contracts and business-as-usual wind development.

It is about time for a change. Rural Ontarians are mad about wind development, as are Lakeside communities, fishermen, and boaters.

Indeed, Ontario is about as fed up as a province can be with a laundry list of discontent ranging from 1) increased hydro bills and announced electricity rate hikes of 40% in the next years; 2) a tax-grab ‘Harmonized Sales Tax’ and 3) a Green Energy Act, which took away Municipal rights to project planning and superseded other environmental legislation.…

Congress is rightfully concerned about closing the huge, systemic budget deficit. In this climate, eliminating Section 1603 grants for politically correct renewable energy should be considered an easy target.

By way of background, this particular subsidy came about due to persistent pressure from lobbying groups like American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Their main argument is that these grants will promote jobs and economic benefits. Of course, as lobbyists this is what they are paid to say. But in these times of more focused financial prudence, we need to critically look at such expenditures in a more objective light — especially since we are talking about some five billion dollars.

The 1603 Grants should be cancelled entirely. In my view the best way to see how ineffective these expenditures are is to consider what the alternatives are for this same money.…