“Since Siemens’ tax-sheltering market is drying up in Europe, their marketing efforts in the U.S. are clearly geared towards increasing income for its investors via wind’s tax sheltering schemes here. Taxpayers, consumers take note!”

If you watch much mainstream TV, you’ve probably seen Siemens’ recent  multi-million-dollar advertising blitz  to sell the American public on industrial wind.

As it turns out, the wind business abroad has taken a huge hit of late. European countries have begun slashing renewable mandates due to the ever-broadening realization that renewables cost far more than industrial wind proponents have led everyone to believe — not only economically, but environmentally, technically, and civilly as well.

As reported in the article Siemens onshore, offshore pain: “Siemens’ energy business took a €48m hit in the second quarter related to a bearings issue with onshore turbines and a €23m charge due to ongoing offshore grid issues in Germany.”…

The words “environmental justice“ were coined years ago to help stop low-income living areas from being selected for unwanted property additions such as landfills and industrial plants. Now, this term is used by environmentalists to enlist minority groups such as African-Americans and Latinos to help them in their goals to stop fossil fuel use.

The claim is that minorities suffer more from health effects due to fossil-fuel use because they live closer to power plants or refineries. Thus we need to replace such facilities with renewable energies such as solar and wind. No thought is given to higher priced electricity from these energy sources and how this impacts minority communities. And concerns about sprawl are forgotten since this solution is really a call for energy sprawl.

Based on faulty science, environmental movements have called for banning the following with disproportionate effects on minorities:

1. …

“The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths. Progress is limited largely by the availability of trained workers. The more people who enter our population by birth or immigration, the faster will be the rate of progress of our material and cultural civilization.”

Population and Progress

With respect to population growth: A dozen competent statistical studies, starting in 1967 with an analysis by Nobel prizewinner Simon Kuznets, agree that there is no negative statistical relationship between economic growth and population growth. There is strong reason to believe that more people have a positive effect in the long run.

Population growth does not lower the standard of living – all the evidence agrees.…

“[Tom] Steyer has proven himself a master at working the system, first to amass a fossil-fuel fortune, and now to bask in the applause of the environmental left even as he feeds at the green energy subsidy trough…. Thus has he descended into a display of crass dishonesty shameless even by Beltway standards.”

– B. Zycher, “He’s Explaining, and He’s Losing.” The Hill,  July 18, 2014.

It’s good to have Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D economist and longtime energy scholar, at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

He continues the intellectual tradition carried on, most recently, by Stephen Hayward and Kenneth Green. And this tradition goes back to when AEI led the fight against oil and gas price and allocation controls in the dark 1970s. Twenty-five studies in their National Energy Project (1974–76) and Studies in Energy Policy (1976–85) helped make up for Resources for the Future taking a Malthusian left turn.…