[Editor Note: In “Speaking of Power” (October 2012), POWER editor-in-chief Robert Peltier takes issue with a recent analysis concluding that the EPA’s new CO2 rule for powerplants was inconsequential. Since his editorial was published, it was reported that a second wave of CO2 powerplant regulations are in the works.]
Cato Institute senior fellows Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren suggest in a recent Forbes blog that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) carbon pollution standard for new coal-fired power plants (Standard) is a meaningless skirmish in President Obama’s “war on coal.” But while the Standard may have no tangible impact on the industry in the future, it has great strategic benefit to the administration.
Going from Facts …
The blog posting, “President Obama’s Alleged ‘War on Coal’—Climate Change Edition,” correctly assesses the situation: First, the EPA’s recently proposed Standard covers only new coal-fired power plants built 12 months after the Standard goes into effect, perhaps in 2014, probably in 2015.…
Continue Reading“As our nation’s first Green president, my mandate won’t be just to ‘create new jobs.’ My mandate, if elected, will be to end mass unemployment … through a Green New Deal … which will create 25 million jobs through direct public works programs and support for cooperatives and community businesses.”
– Jill Stein, USA Today, October 4, 2012.
Last week, the energy view of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson was reviewed at MasterResource. The wish was that the Republican ticket of Romney/Ryan would take to heart the fundamental free-market approach of Johnson for the benefit of consumers, taxpayers, and the general economy.
Then there is the Green Party, whose government planning approach to energy and the environment lurks in the hearts and minds of Obama science advisor John Holdren and no doubt others deep inside the Administration.…
Continue Reading“The federal PTC should expire since it has morphed from an ill-designed temporary subsidy for a purportedly ‘infant industry,’ into an inequitable tax hand-out for what is clearly a well-established industry that distorts markets and allows wind to compete unfairly with both conventional generation resources and even other types of renewables.”
– David Dismukes, “Removing Big Wind’s Training Wheels: The Case for Ending the Federal Production Tax Credit,” November 2012.
The federal wind Production Tax Credit (“PTC”), first enacted in 1992[1] to “jump start” a nascent, but promising industry,[2] provides wind producers with a subsidy of $22 per megawatt hour of electricity generated.[3] The PTC has been extended seven times, [4]but is scheduled to expire under current law on December 31, 2012. Extension of the federal wind PTC has become the “stalking horse” in the debate on government’s role in picking energy “winners and losers.”…
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