The New Hampshire House of Representatives, the third largest legislative body in the world, voted yesterday to end the state’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative cap-and-trade program. The House voted 251-108 after less than 5 minutes of debate to repeal the law under which the state joined RGGI. A number of Democrats refused to attend due to other legislation voted the same day to declare state employees to be employed at-will rather than having collective bargaining rights.
Aimed at reducing the the greenhouse gas emissions in the region, the RGGI program is a coalition of 10 northeastern US states issuing their own carbon credits under a cap and trade program. Under the program, emitters must either reduce their emissions to a specified level or purchase credits from others at auction on cap and trade markets that carry the RGGI credits. Proceeds of the auction are ostensibly used to fund energy efficiency programs, however critics have complained that electric users are funding efficiency programs that don’t directly benefit them.
Governor John Lynch, a Democrat who supports the RGGI, says repealing the law would cost the taxpayers $6 million a year, while the state forfeits $12 million a year in funding.
NH belongs to a regional power pool that dictates electric rates paid by members. If NH quites RGGI, electric rates paid by residents would still carry costs included that represent carbon credits purchased by RGGI members that belong to the pool.
New Hampshire has one of the highest levels of electric production by nuclear and renewable energy sources in the country (53.1% of Net Generated MWh):
Those wishing to support this legislative move by the state House are encouraged to contact Governor Lynch: Contact Governor Lynch: Office of the Governor State House 107 North Main Street Concord, NH 03301 (603)271-2121 (603)271-7640 (fax) |
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“We are all Maine’rs now.”
apachewhoknows says:
March 31, 2011 at 7:11 pm
“We are all Maine’rs now.”
_______________________________________________–
Just because your cat had her kittens in the oven doesn’t make’ m muffins.
Larger than the US Congress or British Parliament? I don’t think so.
Daniel H,
I see that you commented without first verifying.
“The legislature is called the General Court. It consists of the House of Representatives (400 members) and the Senate (24 members).
The General Court is the third-largest legislature in the English speaking world… There is one Representative for about every 3,300 residents.[11] In order for the U.S. Congress to have the same representation, there would need to be approximately 93,000 Representatives.”
From Wiki.
Smokey, thanks for the info, article corrected.
Smokey, I have to agree with Daniel H here. That’s a really obscure interpretation of the phrase “largest legislative body in the world”. And even your quote states it’s the third-largest, not the largest.
You could equally argue that the Tasmanian government in Australia is the “largest legislative body in the world” by using an interpretation that calculates the average area covered by each representative, since, in theory at least, Tasmania manages the Australian Antarctic Territory, and that would easily mean that each member represents the largest area.
Or, alternatively, you can look at China and calculate the number of people represented by each member of their parliament and see if that’s the largest from that point of view.
However, I think it makes a lot more sense to interpret the phrase as being the largest by number… and it’s clearly not by that common sense definition.
Using obscure definitions without explanation just confuses things.
Graeme,
We granite staters are justly proud of how “close to the people” our legislature is. Not only does it make legislators much more responsive to their respective constituents, it makes it much easier for an individual to get elected. I know most legislators here in NH rarely spend more than $1000 to get elected. The pay stinks too, we pay our legislators $200 a year for gas money, thats it, plus they get a free Fast Pass for the toll booths. So it truly is the one body that can truly be described as a “citizen legislature”. We have all sorts of bills getting considered this session, one that legalizes concealed carry without a license, another that legalizes brandishing a weapon against trespassers on one’s own property, we have a constitutional amendment reestablishing the legislature as the supreme body to determine how schools should be funded and by how much (we’ve had a long battle with the supreme court trying to order us around on that), and another one reestablishes state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws. Where most states are desperate to keep the growth in their budgets down, NH not only has the lowest state tax burden per capita, it is cutting its budget by 5% this year, not cutting an increase, cutting the budget vs last years spending.
Good news.
How did NH get away with no wind farms? Lucky them.
The fact that there may be little wind in NH is no excuse … the Brits built ’em anyway. ☺
Clive
From Wind Farm Blighted Alberta
Live Free or Die
So, NH has some “fleebaggers” too eh? Seems to be spreading.
When they get bought, they stay bought.
would love to see the folks in NH shut off power to Massachusetts from their Seabrook power plant. Lets see how many cape wind farms it would take to replace it. 😉
And yes, I live in Massachusetts.
Graeme W,
My apologies for being obscure. I should have said the largest number of “representatives per capita.”
The RGGI was a brazen snookering by MA over NH. The Democrat controlled legislature and executive over the past eight years had prostrated themselves over a large barrel while MA had its way with them. MA siphons energy from our Seabrook plant, in return for future consideration from Nantucket wind farms, that will never happen. The great irony is that these Democ-Rats have recently proposed that we get back some of that stolen electricity by buying from Quèbec! The cheek!
Great move. BTW, our legislature is the largest per capita in the world, and the third largest numerically. Senators and Representatives get paid (get this) $100 per annum!
Tasmania or UK, we luv ya man! But your systems aren’t close to the representation we have here in the Granite State. LFOD!
Gov. Lynch, don’t lynch us anymore…sign the bill.
Slowly but surly the scam that is cap and trade and global warming is dying on the vine. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) was a giant ponzi scheme they hoped would grow nation wide it was meant to bypass federal regulations or lack of them, with phony auctions with a wink and a nod that was designed take consumer on a wild and expensive ride with no benefit except to insiders or the wealthy old boys socialist/green club. New Hampshire will suffer a little pain up front, but will be well rewarded from getting rid of this lousy warmist milking scheme. It was always about cronyism and corporate welfare with states and rentseekers willing to sell their citizens souls for a slice of the money pie or some RGGI grants.
[snip . . . it may seem a sensible strategy to repost, several times, an item you assume to be lost or even ignored but it isn’t really. Your initial post went into the spam bin because it contained the word “scam”, as did your second follow up. We moderators generally deal with new posts before going to the spam folder where we retrieve posts that aren’t spam and then trash the ones that are. Generally posts containing words like scam , con, Hitler, Nazi and so on , or a myriad of links to other sites will be dropped in the spam bin automatically by the WordPress filter. A moderator will then go through them in detail and decide which ones should be posted to the active thread.
Depending on the presence of moderators and the workload this can take anything from a few minutes to perhaps an hour or more. Please give thought to this and should your contribution not appear in a timescale that seems reasonable to you you would be best advised to post an innocuous comment asking if your post might be in the spam folder. This will alert the moderator to this possibility and he/she will deal with it then. Reposting the same message will result in the same outcome you are trying to resolve without the moderator being aware.
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Clive,
There are wind turbines here and there, most don’t function or were never completed cause the companies installing them failed when their pie-in-the-sky assumptions failed to pan out. NH has pretty good wind power potential, but the very same people who hug their trees and maintain their Sierra Club memberships, and believe in AGW, are also the people who have their attorneys file lawsuits against any local attempt to raise up wind turbines or cellphone towers that would despoil the view from their homes.
@Smokey
I didn’t need to verify what I already knew to be true, which is that the US Congress and British Parliament have more members than the New Hampshire legislature. It’s simple arithmetic.
@mikelorrey
The article is still incorrect. The New Hampshire House of Representatives is not the third largest legislative body in the world. The German Bundestag, the French National Assembly, the Japanese Diet, the Brazilian Congress, the Indian Parliament, et cetera, are all substantially larger. Hence, the New Hampshire House of Representatives is the third largest legislative body in the English speaking world.
Regarding the NH RGGI repeal bill, it shouldn’t be necessary to contact the governor’s office since he’s powerless to stop the repeal from being implemented. Other news articles that I’ve read have mentioned that the bill is “veto-proof” because the Republicans have a supermajority in both the state House and Senate. So contacting the governor is sort of a moot point.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/6936-nh-house-votes-to-repeal-greenhouse-gas-law
[Reply: If you had read the comments you would have seen that “the third largest body in the English speaking world” had already been posted and sourced. ~dbs, mod.]
Various comments about the news and NH politics.
This was actually the second House vote on HB 519-FN. The first vote was also “Ought to Pass” 246-104. The -FN suffix is applied to bills that may have a substantial financial impact. That first vote merely transferred the bill to the House Finance committee for review, I produced http://wermenh.com/rggiwatch/finance_notes.html and passed it out before the committee hearing. That committee passed it with a 26-6 vote. BTW, all these are pretty much party line votes, a bit disappointing. That sent it back to the full House, and now it’s off to the Senate.
There are only 24 senators and while the bill hasn’t made it on to the senate calendar, I’ve been a bit remiss in figuring out where it goes and who supports it or not. The president of the senate may be a RGGI supporter, so that’s an issue. I think the bill will go to a senate committee, then the full senate, then get vetoed by the governor, and then the veto will be overridden by the house and senate.
I live eight miles north of the state house and have a flexible enough work schedule so attending hearings and whatnot is pretty easy.
Joe D’Aleo has also been involved in testifying in favor of the bill and bringing in outside support from SPPI and elsewhere. (Joe is partially responsible for me getting involved in this sordid field when I did.)
“we pay our legislators $200 a year for gas money, thats it, plus they get a free Fast Pass for the toll booths.”
I think you’re wrong – it’s $200 for the biennium, so only $100 a year. (A common joke is that we get our money’s worth.) In addition to free tolls they also get a mileage reimbursement for the commute to Concord. I forget what that is, but for some it’s the largest component of their renumeration.
Senators get their own secretary, representatives have to share a secretary with several other reps.
The Bill of Rights in our state constitution includes the Right to Revolution. More than a right, actually, we have the duty to revolt against a government that misbehaves:
It was adopted with most of the rest on June 2, 1784 when memories of King George were still fresh in the colonials’ minds. So far it hasn’t been invoked, but we remind the legislature every so often to keep them in line.
NH is < 5% of RGGI, at least when measured by allowances; I guess we'll have to soldier on without you guys somehow.
As far as I can tell from http://www.rggi.org/docs/Investment_of_RGGI_Allowance_Proceeds.pdf, as a low-carbon energy exporter, NH was doing pretty well by RGGI, but, Live Free or Die and all that.
For what it's worth, Seabrook is 1/8 owned by MA muni utilities, and all NE generators feed the same grid; good luck cutting us Massholes off.
An aside: The town meeting in my town (Concord, MA, where the Shot Heard 'Round the World was actually fired, though we recognize and appreciate that some folks from NH did come down for the show, even though much of NH was happily loyalist because their English governor at the time, John Wentworth, was a pretty good guy, but I digress) is technically a legislative body. Our population is about 17,000, and we typically draw 1,000 for town meeting, for a 17:1 ratio; do we get a prize?
Live free or die!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Note the irony that it required a backlash to allow such back to basics reform to overwhelm politics-as-usual meandering. It was a backlash not against the left, for that already exists in the mere existence of the right. It was a libertarian movement against statism and liberalism within the right. Few skeptics seem very political actually in that there is on average an aversion to admission that the likes of Fox News have vastly amplified awareness of the founding principles of the country.
Did I mention that FN is chock full of uber hotties with law degrees instead of neurotic whiners?
Clive says:
March 31, 2011 at 8:59 pm
There are some, and there have been state house hearings fairly recently about more. We do have wind – Mt Washington claims to have “the world’s worst weather” and held held the record wind speed measured by a ground station (231 mph – 372 kph) until an Australian system managed to withstand a major typhoon.
While there must be places with worse weather, there may be no others where you can so easily go from the base of the auto road in comfortable weather and reach sub-freezing hurricane force winds blowing chunks of rime ice in the fog. The record time up the road is only 6m20.47s (that’s an average speed of 72 mph).
They’re going to start plowing the road on April 23. I don’t think it will go very quickly this year. The foot of snow they’ll get tomorrow is not the problem, lack of warm weather is.
Oh yes, wind farms. There has been some very vocal opposition to a proposed DC power line from HydroQuebec to NH (there’s already one that goes through NH to Massachusetts). I intend to refer to that debate in any future hearings about wind turbines on mountain ridges.
Getting to those ridges is expensive – the mountains are granite and unforgiving, and the winds are often too strong. Winters are worse – and long.
Ric,
Cool video. Though did you notice they had VT plates?
I’ve done the foot race up that road a couple times- a bit slower and more painful.
Oh – one last thing tonight, just for all the NH folk here (how many of us are there?)
This Saturday is the 3rd local energy conference at Merrimack Valley High School here in Penacook – walking distance for me!
http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/les2011/
$30 – includes parking, I’ll ask for a discount. 🙂
It’s mostly green energy types and Cameron Wake, the leading AGW supporter in the state will be there. Also US Congressman Charlie Bass (who would be worth $100/year, but he gets lot more than that). I’m going and will ask all the biomass burners if they’ve seen faster tree growth lately. I know some pine sapling in Nashua that have been putting on more than a foot per year, I should get photos and measurements.
And one really last note – there’s more NH stuff at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/03/july-snow-in-new-hampshire/
Hell Ric you should work for the Tourist Office. :))