“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.”…

“[Sen. Harry] Reid’s attacks have drawn cries of McCarthyism from around the political world, including MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and Mother Jones editor Daniel Schulman. And they’ve even created discomfort among liberal big-money donors and operatives, who worry the argument might expose them to charges of hypocrisy, while they also question the effectiveness of running against donors who won’t appear on any ballots.”

– Kenneth Vogel, “Behind Harry Reid’s War Against the Koch Brothers,”  POLITICO, July 7, 2014.

It was an all-too-familiar reframe: guilt by association (and in this case guilt from false/good association). At Climate Progress, Joe Romm breathlessly reported last month that “Bjorn Lomborg Is Part of the Koch Network—and Cashing In.” In Romm’s vitriolic words:

You know the T-shirt-wearing climate inactivist Lomborg (aka the Danish Delayer) from such recent gems as “Subsidizing renewables won’t stop global warming” and “What an increasingly wonderful world” and “The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels” (seriously — or not).

“[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.…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

– Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Most Americans easily recall these eloquent words with which the Founding Fathers expressed the basis of their claim for independence from Great Britain in 1776.…