Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold the first of three hearings on S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” also known as Kerry-Boxer, after its co-sponsors Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Kerry-Boxer is the Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as Waxman-Markey, after its co-sponsors Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA).
For those worried about the economic impacts of these bills, I bring unwelcome news: their bite is worse than their bark. Escalator clauses common to both bills, ignored in most previous analyses, are the setup for dramatic increases in regulatory stringency well beyond the bills’ explicit emission reduction targets. Similarly, “findings” presenting the “scientific” rationale for cap-and-trade are not mere rhetorical fluff but precedents for litigation targeting emission sources considerably smaller than those explicitly identified as “covered entities.”…
Continue ReadingOn June 26, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill, known also as the cap-and-trade bill. This is unfortunate because cap-and-trade takes up no more than 30 percent of its pages. The rest of the telephone-book-sized HR 2454 detailed new regulations, wealth transfers and taxes whose aggregate adverse impacts may well surpass those of cap-and-trade.
Here is a quick list of some important provisions of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, nicknamed the Enron Revitalization Act of 2009 here at MasterResource.
… Continue ReadingStill more encouragement for renewable resources that cannot pass market tests. A national “renewable portfolio standard” will require that 20 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2020 (relative to 2.8 percent today) come from sources the law defines as “renewable” or (to a limited degree) improvements in efficiency.
Editor Note: Jon Boone, a lifelong environmentalist, co-founded the North American Bluebird Society and has consulted for the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in New York. He has been a formal intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission hearings and produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant.
Industrial wind technology is a meretricious commodity, attractive in a superficial way but without real value—seemingly plausible, even significant but actually false and nugatory.
Those who would profit from it either economically or ideologically are engaged in wholesale deception. For in contrast to their alluring but empty promises of closed coal plants and reduced carbon emissions is this reality: Wind energy is impotent while its environmental footprint is massive and malignant.
A wind project with a rated capacity of 100 MW, for example, with 40 skyscraper-sized turbines, would likely produce an annual average of only 27 MW, an imperceptible fraction of energy for most grid systems.…
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