“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do to foist onto consumers … 20 to 30 percent higher energy rates in an opt-out program. If people want to spend more money … to buy green energy … that is terrific…. But to coerce them into doing it in an opt-out program … is the wrong approach.”
– Mark Farrell, San Francisco Supervisor, 2012 (quoted below)
Thousands of San Francisco residents may be sucked into a green energy plan that will raise their electricity rates 77 percent without their knowledge or consent. Beginning next spring, half of the city’s 375,000 residential ratepayers will automatically be enrolled in CleanPowerSF – unless they take action to opt out of the program. Eventually the entire city will be enrolled in the program unless they choose to opt out.…
Continue ReadingIn good economic times or bad, Thanksgiving is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy the most special meal of the year. The event remembers those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.
The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.
In the New World, they wanted to erect a New Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout, but be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism.…
Continue ReadingThe Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations who are interested in improving national. state and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that: 1) we do have energy and environmental issues, and 2) these technical matters should be resolved by using genuine science.
Instead our energy and environmental policies have essentially being written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result of our current methodology, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.
A key element of AWED’s efforts is to educate the public. Towards that end we send out a newsletter every 2-3 weeks, and this attempts to put some balance into what the mainstream media is conveying about energy and environmental matters.…
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