The Court of Appeals of Georgia has overturned last year’s decision by Fulton County Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore to invalidate the permit issued for the $2 billion, 1,200 mega-watt Longleaf power plant, reports Carbon Control News.
JunkScience.com readers won’t be surprised since the Court of Appeals decision is based on the legal rationale laid out last July in this column by Steve Milloy.
So-called “clean energy” projects no longer need to be operational and produce income to get taxpayer subsidies.
The Departments of Energy and Treasury announced yesterday that $3 billion worth of stimulus funds will be paid directly to clean energy developers in exchange for foregoing future tax credits, according to a report in Restructuring Today (July 10).
Now how did that Steve Miller Band song go? Oh yeah…
Go on take the money and run…
We’ll be able to track this boondoggle at http://www.treas.gov/recovery/1603.shtml.
General Electric and smart-grid start-up Tendril have agreed to develop “smart” appliances that work with the coming “smart” grid, reports Smart Grid Today (July 9).
The deal is pitched as allowing consumers to control their GE appliances via the Internet — but it probably also means that others would be able to monitor and control them as well, including hackers, local governments, local utilities, etc.
North Korea was recently blamed for wreaking havoc in U.S. government networks. We’re going to be really PO-ed if Kim Il Jung interferes with our thermostats and dishwashers. Of course, we won’t be any happier if Barack Obama does the same thing.
American Chemistry Council head Cal Dooley has been tasked to appease the Senate climate gods by suggesting that the Waxman-Markey greenhouse gas emission reduction schedule be scaled back from 17% by 2020 to 14% by 2020, reports Carbon Control News (July 9). In return for that concession and more free emissions credits, the chemical industry is apparently willing to sell the rest of us down the river.
Maybe Dooley’s group should just change its name to the Death-to-America Chemistry Council?
If you live in the St. Louis, MO-area, you should patronize McArthur’s Bakery. Here’s why…
Complaining about the impact of Waxman-Markey on his small business, David McArthur of St. Louis-based McArthur’s Bakery said on Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck show (Eric Bolling sitting in for Glenn Beck) that,
You know, there are physics that say it takes a certain amount of energy to take a dough product to make it into a bread product. And nothing that anyone wants to do to make the world greener is going to change the amount of energy that goes into that.
This tax directly applies to us as well as every other food manufacturer. And so what it is going to do, long term, essentially says, “You haven’t cut back, so we’re going to continue to tax you and tax you more.” That’s a penalty. You know, quite frankly, the only way I can use less energy to bake a loaf of bread is to quit baking it.
Best of all, the bakery took action. McArthur said:
Well, Saturday, two weeks ago, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, I went to our reader board. We’ve got one of those nice reader board signs on our location. Out front, and I typed “Russ Carnahan voted to close us and other small business.” It was just in sheer – just aggravation, just fed up with it.
What is your business doing to fight Waxman-Markey?
Here’s Part 1 of the interview:
Here’s Part 2 of the interview:
Toledo Rep. Marcy Kaptur received $3.5 billion to vote for the Waxman-Markey bill. As reported by the Washington Times,
When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.
They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted – a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state’s Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.
To paraphrase James Carville,
Drag a $3.5 billion bribe through the halls of Congress and there’s no telling what you’ll find.
While some say that Waxman-Markey will never pass the Senate because of economic considerations, remember we said that:
Make sure Senators know that a vote for Waxman-Markey (or whatever bill the Senate develops) is a vote against their reelection — apparently the only price that they can’t afford.
President Obama’s stimulus package is slowing the development of so-called “renewable energy” projects as developers shun private capital in hopes of getting better deals from the government.
The problem is that,
None of these incentives has yet been defined with specific rules and none of the programs are yet accepting applications…
And the rentseekers aren’t happy.
Matt Cheney, chief executive of Renewable Ventures, the U.S. subsidiary of Fotowatio SL, a Spanish developer of renewable-energy projects said of Obama’s stimulus program,
“It artificially slowed the recovery.”
Keshav Prasad, vice president of business development at Signet Solar Inc. added,
“We will not close on anything until we finally hear from the DOE on the loan guarantee.”
Bureaucracy thwarts rentseeking!
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is “days” away from releasing a Senate version of the Waxman-Markey bill that just passed the House, according to Carbon Control News.
Based on comments from Sen. John Kerry made at a July 8 hearing, the Senate version will “revise” [read “water down”] the Waxman-Markey imposition of tariffs on goods from countries that don’t reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Click here for a new GAO report on trade options for climate legislation.
Unions won’t be happy about a retreat on tariffs…
From today’s Wall Street Journal:
Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water…
Government agencies have opposed desalination because of the process’s energy consumption. The desalination plant would use nearly twice as much energy as a wastewater-treatment plant available in Orange County. Environmental groups also object because fish and other organisms are likely to be sucked into the facility.
“Eventually, people will have to realize, it’s either fish or children,” Mr. Lewis said…
Officials in Carlsbad began discussing desalination in 1998 and planned to open the plant this year. But opposition was fierce.
The Surfrider Foundation and San Diego Coastkeeper — two local environmental groups — argue the plant would be disastrous for marine life, “killing everything that floats” near the plant’s intake, said Surfrider’s Joe Geever.
The permitting process continued for six years, and included 14 public hearings that ran a total of 170 hours and included five revisions to the plan…
“In a sign of the difficulties facing the development of wind energy, T. Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas oilman, is suspending plans to build the world’s largest wind farm,” reports reports the New York Times.
We are proud to have helped expose the Pickens Plan for the scam that it was.
This is quite the embarrassing legacy for the “legendary Texas oilman.”
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Olympia Snow (RINO-ME) have introduced a bill to make the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the sole regulator of the carbon market created by cap-and-trade legislation.
So does this mean that freebooting Goldman Sachs could be the de facto regulator of the carbon market?
Consider that:
As the global warming bubble inflates and then bursts, will Goldman Sachs self-regulate all the way to the bank… making record profits at the expense and misery of taxpayers and consumers?
Can you tell the difference between the CFTC and Goldman Sachs?
EPA officials have suggested to Kansas environmental officials that integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology be considered as “best available control technology” for the controversial coal-fired Holcomb Power Plant proposed to be built by Sunflower Electric Power Corp.
But this is a thinly-veiled effort by the EPA to apply pressure against the construction of new coal-fired power plants.
IGCC, which involves turning coal into gas before combustion, is an expensive and a not-ready-for-prime-time technology that could force utilities simply to opt out of coal and into natural gas.
An industry source told Carbon Control News,
“If IGCC is going to be considered BACT for coal generation, then you might as well throw in natural gas as well because in both cases you’re using entirely different forms of generation to achieve lower emissions.”
BACT is the EPA standard that must be met for new sources of air emissions.