Search Results for: "Ken Lay"
Relevance | DateDebt-Deal Warnings for Energy Subsidies
By Gary Hunt -- August 9, 2011 16 Comments[Gary Hunt, President of Scalable Growth Strategy Advisors, posts on energy issues at his website, Zap! Crackle! Pop! Disruptive Technology, Global Competition and our Energy Future.]
The drama that raised the national debt ceiling without increasing taxes is sending warning shots across the bow for many industries. The message for energy subsidies, including the tax credits and treasury tax grants for wind and solar, as well as tax credits for oil and gas companies, could not be clearer. The gravy train is ending because the Government cannot afford it, and political realities won’t tolerate it much longer.
The debt deal did not cut renewable energy subsidies. But it set up a super committee of Congress that must produce $1.3 trillion in spending cuts by Thanksgiving. This sets up a ruthless competition between all the special interest causes that now get subsidies or tax supported benefits.…
Continue ReadingOntario's Great Windpower Escape: A Setback Only
By Sherri Lange -- August 4, 2011 7 Comments[Sherri Lange’s previous reports on the Ontario wind siting battles are “Wind’s Political Trouble in Ontario (Secretive Samsung deal, power rates at issue)’ from May 11 and Ontario Update: Offshore Wind Moratorium Decision Hangs Tough, Onshore BAU Targetedfrom April 8.]
In an Elvis-has-left-the-building-but-might-be-coming-back kind of moment, the Environmental Review Tribunal (ERT) in Ontario announced to that the Kent Breeze turbine project could continue. The appellants failed in this instance to prove that there would be “serious” health effects posed by the project, ERT determined.
The Tribunal did leave the doors open for future challenges, however. And not all is lost: this project was the first ever public legal challenge based on health and safety concerns.
Expect victories in the future. On the heels of this pro-wind decision that despaired many around the world tuned into this legal challenge, came Carl Phillips’ release of an epidemiological study: there are very real and verifiable health consequences for living too near turbines.…
Continue ReadingTowards a New Environmentalism (open criticism, midcourse correction, and scholarship needed)
By Steve Hayward -- July 27, 2011 6 CommentsMasterResource is home to a growing number of grassroot environmentalists who are challenging the Washington, D.C. establishment to reconsider industrial wind turbines. Jen Gilbert’s Dear Sierra Club (Canada): I Resign Over Your Anti-Environmental Wind Support and Jon Boone’s three-part The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method of what Robert Bradley has summarized in his post, Windpower: Environmentalists vs. Environmentalists (NIMBYism, precautionary principle vs. industrial wind).
My piece for National Review (reprinted below) looks at the bigger picture of how reasoned criticism and intellectual diversity have struggled to penetrate the environmental mainstream. The result of such intolerance has been Faustian bargains such as the Sierra Club going all-in for wind power (see their response to Robert Bryce’s recent op-edin the New York Times).…
Continue ReadingThe Shale Gas Hit Piece: The New York Times (minus public editor Brisbane) Doubles Down on a Bad Bet
By Chris Tucker -- July 20, 2011 8 CommentsWhen New York Magazine reported earlier this month that the national editor of the New York Times had sent an internal memo laying out a “surprisingly detailed” defense of reporter Ian Urbina’s latest front-page attack on natural gas, the hope was that the memo would spur an equally detailed response by Arthur Brisbane, the Times’ public editor.
That hope was realized when Mr. Brisbane’s 1,100-word piece was postedon the paper’s website over the weekend, a column in which Brisbane takes square aim at the Times for going “out on a limb” and “lack[ing] an in-depth dissenting view in the text” (see the Appendix below for more of his piece).
The Brisbane piece is remarkable for a number of reasons and on a number of levels, continuing the healthy scrutiny that spontaneously emerged from various respected experts over the past three weeks.…
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