It's time.

Over the past few years, along with the huge raft of federal support the wind industry receives via tax credits, payouts, regulations, and initiatives, it’s also been all the rage for states to set up their own wind-friendly subsidies and renewable portfolio standards to help out the wind industry so that politicians at all levels [...]

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Priorities.

The Obama administration has rarely passed up an opportunity to continue their relentless subsidization of the biofuels industry — the EPA has lately been particularly defensive about their requirement that fuel producers mix part of their product with certain non-existent cellulosic biofuels, to several lawmakers’ chagrin — and the Obama administration even has the Pentagon [...]

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Finally.

Ah, the Renewable Fuel Standard. What can I say about the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires fuel producers to blend a certain amount of biofuels into their product? That its existence inflates an artificial market for a product consumers don’t really want to buy? That its corn-based components drive up food prices at home and [...]

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Tragedy strikes.

I am mystified as to why I am supposed to interpret this as a bad thing. Gains made in the last four years to build dozens of renewable energy projects on public lands and create a regulatory framework for offshore wind production in the United States could be stymied by the large federal budget cuts [...]

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Fiscal reality is hard.

For me, one of the most perplexing moments (out of the many) of President Obama’ State of the Union address last week was when he insisted that “as long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.” So… because China is doing it, we must also relentlessly throw money we [...]

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Because, logic.

Germany, which often prides itself on being a world leader in promoting (i.e., subsidizing) renewable energies and ‘sustainability,’ has been debating over whether or not they should open up their underground shale oil-and-gas reserves for hydraulic fracturing — with the necessarily accompanying ‘enlightened’-greenie protestations, of course. It’s not that Germany doesn’t use gas — they [...]

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Let's talk.

President Obama simply cannot allow the start of his legacy-building second term to be dominated by complicated fiscal cliffs, unpopular sequesters, tiresome continuing resolutions, and, oh yeah — our still unimpressive economic “recovery” — which is why he’s looking to do some work on the big-ticket issues of immigration, gun control, and climate change. He [...]

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Powering down.

The day before he announced that he will be departing his post at the Department of Energy last week, Secretary Chu was talking a big game about the Obama administration’s ongoing plans for electric vehicles — but was somewhat less specific than usual about the administration’s once wildly ambitious and now apparently erstwhile goals, via [...]

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It's not that easy, being green.

Last summer, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta lamented that, in terms of the Pentagon’s budget, the pending sequestration cuts “were designed as a meat ax… It was designed to be a disaster. Because the hope was, because it’s such a disaster, that Congress would respond and do what was right. And so I’m just here [...]

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Let's cool those jets for a hot second.

Having heard it straight from President Obama last Monday, the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” looming in our immediate future are all imminent catastrophes fueled by rapid climate change about which we simply must do something right away — but this is exactly the type of alarmist rhetoric [...]

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Well, that's a relief.

…Just what we’ve all been so eagerly waiting for, I’m sure. The U.S. identified about 192,000 acres of government-owned land in Arizona that are suitable for commercial-scale solar and wind farms. The agency also established the Agua Caliente Solar Energy Zone, 2,550 acres in the state with strong sunlight and few resource conflicts that are [...]

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'Cause what's ten million dollars here and there, really?

Why the Obama administration is so recklessly determined to play venture capitalist and turn every endeavor that might legitimately lead to “green” energy into a race for rent-seeking, regardless of the costs and consequences, is beyond me. The federal government has already made a hot mess of the biofuels industry in general, catering to special [...]

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Let's get real.

Like many states, Virginia has implemented certain tax breaks, quotas, and/or incentives on behalf of particular green technologies over the years, not because it was a legitimately excellent idea (read: California), but because it was just the vogue political thing to do at the time. Now that the economy is decidedly on the strugglebus and [...]

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Le sigh.

France’s government may be having difficulties on agreeing how to pay for, or at least appearing to pay for, their expensive and unsustainable socialist state, but never fear, greenies — unaffordable ‘renewable energy’ standards and subsidies will absolutely not fall prey to the awful specter of financial reality. European demand in general is falling off [...]

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Desperately seeking rents.

With Congress and the White House currently concentrating their laser-like focus on averting (or not averting, as the case may be) the fiscal cliff, the fate of various tax extenders is still very much up in the air, including the wind industry’s precious production tax credit (which covers about 30 percent of wind power’s costs [...]

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Totally.

Over the course of Obama’s first four years as president, we watched him ‘evolve’ from a zealous, I-will-slow-the-rise-of-the-oceans climate change champion to a remarkably quiet almost-bystander on the whole debate. Now that his second term is secure, I’m sure we can expect that at least his rhetoric on the subject will once again reach much [...]

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Leading by example.

California seems almost singularly determined to become the most true-blue and subsequently expensive state in the union, and the results of their liberal governance are continuing to bear fruit — and I somehow doubt that California’s legislative supermajority will make any serious attempts at mitigating the pending implosion. Not only are Californians looking at some [...]

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"Investments."

Let me get my obligatory free-trade qualifier out of the way here first: It’s not so much that there’s anything at all wrong with businesses buying and selling on the international arena, because foreign markets may have demands for products we don’t, and we all stand to make money off of one another in a [...]

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That is messed up.

United Nations envoys from around the world have been conferring in Qatar over the past couple of weeks in an effort to, among other goals, re-up the Kyoto Protocol and come up with a framework for a global climate agreement for 2020. Besides guilt-tripping the world’s wealthiest nations into financing their rewewable-energy fancies, one of [...]

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Welp, better tell that to the shale gas boom.

You might think that, given that natural gas has effortlessly accomplished exactly what the eco-extremists have been insisting we need to immediately and forcibly engineer — i.e., measurably reduce our carbon emissions — the greenies would be all over it. But when it comes to their crusade for carbon-reduction, just like President Obama’s recent handling [...]

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"All of the above," isn't.

President Obama certainly knows how to talk a good game when it comes to energy policy; to the low-information layman, “all of the above” sounds like a superficially excellent plan. Work on green energy development, but keep the traditional fuel production comin’ — it’s the best of both worlds, right? Except that that’s not what [...]

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Stuck on stupid.

News flash: Compared to free enterprise, central planning is a reliably inefficient, costly, and ill-fated way to allocate resources. Just kidding, totally not a news flash. It’s just good ol’ fashioned common sense — leastaways, you’d think it would be common sense, given that historical examples abound, except that President Obama doesn’t quite seem to [...]

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The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Because the Obama Department of Energy’s loan-guarantee program for renewable energy startups and technologies has been such an unmitigated and resounding success, most particularly their well-trumpeted “investments” in solar-panel manufacturers, the federal government’s good common sense and dispassionate judgment have proved it to be a leading force in encouraging the research and development that has [...]

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Is that so?

Oh really, Rep. Markey? Tell me more: Markey jabbed Romney by recalling Clint Eastwood’s rambling speech at last week’s Republican convention, where Eastwood used an empty chair to have an imaginary chat with President Obama. “[Romney] actually used to talk about climate change when he was the governor of Massachusetts and not make jokes about [...]

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