The Red White and Blue Pill
The Brazilian authorities have this week confirmed that wind power in the country currently costs less than natural gas, after a series of energy auctions saw wind farm operators undercut other forms of energy generation.
From Brazilian wind power cheaper than natural gas
Good news.
the Senate voted overwhelmingly this afternoon to end the $5-billion-a-year incentive for ethanol production. The vote, according to Wall Street Journal coverage, also would end a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imports of the fuel.
From Senate Votes to End Billions in Ethanol Subsidies
Good news for once.
U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) today introduced the Ethanol Subsidy and Tariff Repeal Act, which will fully eliminate the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) and fully repeal the import tariff on foreign ethanol. Cosponsors also include Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD), Richard Burr (R-NC), Jim Webb (D-VA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and James Risch (R-ID).
“The ethanol subsidy and tariff is bad economic policy, bad energy policy and bad environmental policy. As our nation faces a crushing debt burden, rising gas prices and the prospect of serious inflation, continuing our parochial ethanol policy that increases the cost of energy and food is irresponsible. I’m pleased to introduce this common sense bill with Senator Feinstein and will push for its consideration at the earliest opportunity,” Dr. Coburn said, noting that the bill has been filed as an amendment () to the small business bill pending in the Senate
Bipartisan effort to eliminate a wasteful subsidy that won’t be covered nearly as much as it should be.
If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green,“ Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist
From Reuters
It’s a sad day when the CEO of a company has to practically apologize for excepting science because science is too elitist. WTF.
That is changing. Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. In computing, Moore’s law dictates that the number of components that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months. More practically speaking, the amount of computing power you can buy for a dollar has roughly doubled every 18 months, for decades. That’s the reason that the phone in your pocket has thousands of times as much memory and ten times as much processing power as a famed Cray 1 supercomputer, while weighing ounces compared to the Cray’s 10,000-pound bulk, fitting in your pocket rather than a large room, and costing tens or hundreds of dollars rather than tens of millions.
If similar dynamics worked in solar power technology, then we would eventually have the solar equivalent of an iPhone — incredibly cheap, mass distributed energy technology that was many times more effective than the giant and centralized technologies it was born from.
From The Moore’s Law of solar energy
And when solar is cheaper, expect the right to demand we increase oil and coal subsidies to save jobs.
Al Gore has apparently irked some members of the ethanol lobby by suggesting during a panel discussion at a green business conference on Monday that his earlier support for corn-based ethanol subsidies was “a mistake.”
From Gore Riles Corn Ethanol Lobby – NYTimes.com
Now that he will never run a campaign in Iowa, he can be honest.
But largely missing in the hand-wringing is this: China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.
While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month.
China Far Outpaces U.S. in Building Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants – NYTimes.com
China is switching to cleaner burning coal power plants. We can now retire the old canard that even if we lower carbon emissions, China won’t; therefore we shouldn’t.
Yeah, OK, OK. Well, I think – I mean, I think Gore would have been a disaster as president. We’d have been living in the Dark Ages. I think he’s fundamentally hostile to human civilization. And a phony.
From Media Matters – Carlson: If Al Gore were president, “[w]e’d … be living in yurts in the dark”
This in a nutshell is what drives me crazy about the Climate Crisis debate. People like Tucker Carlson are allowed to keep this silly dichotomy between industry and ecology; between no regulations and living in yuts. This is simply not the case. It is as dishonest as it is logically flawed.
Our atmosphere is a commons in the traditional, ECON-101 sense of the word.
The position that Mr. Gore and many others are advocating is that of using market forces to limit C02 release. Requiring that industry purchase the right to dispose of C02 is a market based, capitalist solution. It rewards those who through hard work, efficiency and smart investments; limit their use of the C02 and punishes those who over-produce waste C02 by requiring that they pay for their waste. It is no different than requiring businesses to pay to have trash hauled away. Those that become more efficient produce less trash, pay less and therefore become more profitable. Those that figure out how to turn other peoples trash into their treasure also profit.
So how on earth can anyone imply that those who want to use market forces to promote more efficient and cleaner technologies are anti-industrial? That whole line of thinking is self-contradictory. No one is suggesting that we dismantle power plants and return to an agrarian economy. Let alone Mr. Gore. No one is suggesting that the government take over power production. In fact, the opposite is true. Those of us that accept the truth on global warming see that the economic boom that could be created in the post-fossil-fuel era will likely create the worlds first trillionaires as well as creating millions of new jobs in the private sector.
People like Tucker Carlson are Carbon Socialists. They defend a system where tax money is collected by scary Big-Government and is used to fund Big Government Bureaucracies to subsidize favored politically connected 18th century technology. And they rail against anything that would force those favored 18th century technologies to compete on a level playing field with modern technologies. They cling to the silly dichotomy of “Market Forces” versus “Carbon Regulation” and refuse to see that this is about “Carbon Regulation via Market Forces”.
We are the ones that are pro-industry. They are the ones that are anti-industry. We favor carbon markets. They favor carbon socialism.
Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraqâs declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report.
From
New York Times
We are fighting a war where the American taxpayer finances both sides of the conflict. One directly via taxes and one indirectly via fuel purchases. Sad fact of the day.
