With little fanfare, an earthquake has rippled through the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). Three significant members, two of them being integrated oil majors, are no longer planning the cap-and-trade (aka, cap-and-tax) game. And if energy affordability and reliability is a metric, expect more companies to bolt. Social corporate responsibility, anyone? After all, there is no climate gain from a unilateral U.S. cap by the alarmists’ own math.

Here is the background. According to its website, USCAP is “a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that have come together to call on the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” Others of a less charitable bent would characterize them as central headquarters of the U.S. Climate-Industrial Complex, a group of corporate rent-seekers (the bootleggers), made whole by the environmental scaremongers (the Baptists) hell-bent on slapping the United States into a carbon rationing scheme.…

[Editor note: Glenn Schleede wrote this letter-to-the-editor in response to  a news report published in the Cape Cod Times, “Cape Wind Savings Pegged in Billions”.]

Dear Editor:

Thanks for the article in your February 11, 2010, edition, but electric customers in New England should not believe the claim that the Cape Wind project will save them “Billions” on their electric bills.

Frankly, the numbers in the slick 9-page “consultant” study released by the developer of the Cape Wind project of $4.6 billion in savings over 25 years just don’t add up for at least four major reasons:

1. Huge Cost of Cape Wind electricity. The true cost of electricity from wind – particularly offshore wind — is huge. No one who is paying attention expects the price that Cape Wind charges for its electricity to be cheap.…

Why has California expressed concern over the EPA holding up approvals for natural gas-fired power plants?

Answer: because state regulators know that California’s gas plants are crucial for establishing new wind and solar projects. After all, firming intermittent power sources is essential short of employing cost-prohibitive battery packs to continuously match supply to consumption.

But the analysis can go a step further. What if the gas backup actually runs more poorly in its fill-in role than if it existed in place of the wind and/or solar capacity? It does run less efficiently, in fact, creating incremental fuel use and air emissions that cancel out the fuel/emissions “savings” from wind.

Thus California should go a step further than just allowing new natural gas capacity. Regulators should rethink the rational of wind per se and block its new capacity–if only by removing the government subsidies that enable industrial wind power in the first place.…

Suppose you began this morning by learning that some investors and developers had stepped forward with a reportedly new type of commercial grade electrical power called “Zephyr Integrated Power” (ZIP). Being clever, they are spending a LOT of time and money marketing ZIP, knowing that this is their chance to break into the grid in a BIG way.

Their message– ZIP is “FREE, CLEAN, AND GREEN”–sounds great! Oh yes, and for good measure, ZIP will create oodles of jobs.

So the basic question is this: exactly what do we do before we allow these people and their new product on the electric grid?

We wouldn’t be so gullible to just take their word for it, would we? Yet this is exactly what we are doing today!

And there is more: our politicians are so enamored with ZIP that they tell these promoters that we will not only allow them on the grid, we will FORCE utilities to use ZIP.…