The Denver Post reports:
President Barack Obama’s top environmental official wasted no time Tuesday taking on opponents of the administration’s plan to crack down on global warming pollution.
In her first speech as the head of EPA, Gina McCarthy told an audience gathered at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., that curbing climate-altering pollution will spark business innovation, grow jobs and strengthen the economy. The message was classic Obama, who has long said that the environment and the economy aren’t in conflict and has sold ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gases as a means to jumpstart a clean energy economy.
McCarthy signaled Tuesday that she was ready for the fight, saying that the agency would continue issuing new rules, regardless of claims by Republicans and industry groups that under Obama the EPA has been the most aggressive and overreaching since it was formed more than 40 years ago.
“Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs? Please, at least for today,” said McCarthy, referring to one of the favorite talking points of Republicans and industry groups.
“Let’s talk about this as an opportunity of a lifetime, because there are too many lifetimes at stake,” she said of efforts to address global warming.
Let’s start carbon cutting by disconnecting all EPA buildings from the grid entirely. Let them run only on renewables, magic pixie dust, whatever they want. If it’s the chance of a lifetime, I expect to see all EPA offices off the grid by the end of the year. Opportunity does not knock forever–they need to be quick.
I listened to part of that speech. Do we hire up people so stupid that they really believe that artificially increasing the cost of energy and limiting energy availability creates jobs? I listened to repeated “cahbun” chants. The only job creation is the rent seekers.
The dump is likely of a size that requires a collection and control (flare) system for the landfill gas. If the partnership is like the company I work for, the city gets paid for the gas whether it is used or not (we do a tiered payment based on gas quality and our use). So, basically, the city wins by getting additional income from the dump. Our business model is to buy landfill gas as a cheaper energy than fuel oil or natural gas and generate electricity. In our projects, the only way the dump owners lose is if we go broke. As long as the project doesn’t need subsidies, it is a beneficial use.
Heavily subsidized projects are losers for everything but PR
This comparison would be more fair if we discussed which (if any) of the projects offered funding over, say, $1 million had actually survived and begun to move product. Any venture capital operation is going to have some projects that work out profitably and some that fail — otherwise they’re just regular investors.
More important than the list of failures — and that is important — is the concept. Any government program that links to private sector business is going to favor the current leadership’s agenda. Of course it will; it’s supposed to do that. That’s exactly why government should have as small a role in the private sector as possible. That includes all levels of government. The city of Billings put some money into harvesting methane at the dump and that seems okay to me. But I don’t want the city partnering with an electronics-recycling company because that could easily drive foolish regulation and could take a lot of city money with it if the private sector recycling firm goes bust.
The military may well have niches for alternative energy — an easily-transportable wind system could power comm equipment and save fuel for transport instead of generators. Solar panels on tents could perhaps do the same thing. The space station is primarily solar-powered. But these are niches rather than large-scale “development”.
So far, 36 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having gone bankrupt or laying off workers or heading for bankruptcy. This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy and other agencies. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher.
The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:
Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Schneider Electric ($86 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)
http://nation.foxnews.com/obama/2012/10/20/list-36-obama-s-taxpayer-funded-green-energy-failures
The EPA-created jobs are, most at least, the two-hole kind of job. Joe gets paid to dig it and Maryanne gets paid to fill it back in. It keeps Joe and Maryanne off the street but the value is zero.