The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science.
Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.
A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. To this end, every three weeks or so a newsletter is put together to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We very much appreciate MasterResource for its assistance in publishing this information (for the two most recent reports, see here and here).…
Continue Reading“The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, for example, has estimated that the cost of a one-year PTC extension is $12.1 billion. Thus, even accepting the Report’s grossly inflated number of 37,000 wind jobs, the cost to the American taxpayers would be $12.1 billion divided by 37,000, or about $327,000 per job. [But] … the cost for a one-year PTC extension could be as much as a staggering $4,792,079 per direct up-front job added ($12.1 billion ÷ 2,525 jobs).”
An intellectual nail has been driven into the wind-industry-driven Production Tax Credit, a governmental lifeline keeping an inherently flawed industry afloat. The new study, Inflated Numbers; Erroneous Conclusions: The Navigant Wind Jobs Report, was authored by Charles J. Cicchetti, a noted economics consultant and longtime economics professor (now adjunct) at the University of Southern California.…
Continue Reading“Privately, scientists and analysts within national environmental organizations are appalled that celebrity fractivism could get in the way of the coal-to-gas shift. They say the fractivists undermine green credibility, and are disturbed by the failure of their movement’s leadership.”
Mainstream environmental groups used to support natural gas, which offers significant public health and climate benefits over coal and is a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future. But celebrity activists like Mark Ruffalo, who has a house in the Catskills, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have led the movement astray with NIMBY opposition to fracing in areas such as upstate New York.
Over the last year, celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Robert Redford, Mark Ruffalo, Mario Batali, Scarlett Johansson, Alec Baldwin, and Matt Damon have spoken out against the expansion of natural gas drilling.…
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