When you can’t sell this on the green left coast, you know its gotta fail worldwide.
Gotta love this quote, one of the best denials of reality I’ve ever seen:
“It was a demonstration program, and it’s successfully concluding after meeting its goals,” Romans said. “Certainly we would have loved for more customers to have participated.” said company spokeswoman Katie Romans.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/10/BUPR1LTB45.DTL#ixzz1dWdO8WPl
Now if that way out alarmist Mary Nichols and CARB can get a clue, we might be getting somewhere. CARB is still set to enact cap and trade in California.
I wonder if customers will get the 10 million dollars back they contributed to this “successful demonstration program”?
On the plus side, even Joltin Joe Romm thought the program was dumb
The spin PG&E put on the announcement would be enough to power several generators:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
First you had NIMBY
Not in my back yard….
Now you have NIMBP
Not in my back pocket…
The irony is so strong here. California is the land of green liberals…who of course don’t want their pet programs being paid for out of their own pockets.
=8-)
JerOme says
Our extremely misguided government is about to impose a ruinous tax on us, a ‘Carbon Tax’. I will now refuse to buy renewable energy, as my taxes are now paying far more than I was voluntarily, and much less of that is going toward renewable energy and research.
——–
This just in:
http://m.theage.com.au/environment/energy-smart/at-9-a-family-its-not-all-doom-and-gloom-20111112-1nd3v.html
It seems if you earn enough the carbon tax is going to cost you AUS$9 a week. Relatively speaking not a great deal.
Jer0me;
Talk about buying a pig in a poke! I’d want a really tight on-going audit of that process. Since there are no dedicated lines from ‘green’ energy sources to your home, you’re basically investing in an accounting fiddle.
Good luck with that!
To check the pulse of society, one usually takes polls or runs focus groups.
On rare occasions, some think outside the square. For instance, recently the coppers in the UK wanted to catch up with wanted criminals who had evaded capture.
So I contend that this excercise by PG&E was successful as they claim. Though they are not being open about the goals of the programme’
The goal was to see how many of PG&E customers were morons. 31,000 apparently.
Romans said: “It was a demonstration program, and it’s successfully concluding after meeting its goals,”
The primary goal being to see how many idiots there were in the PG&E service area.
LazyTeenager says:
November 12, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Some of us have principals. The amount is irrelevant. I don’t wish to be forced to pay one extra cent of tax for a scam…NOT ONE CENT.
Not only that, this carbon tax is a trojan horse. There now is no end to the numbers of different taxes that can be imposed on us for all sorts of fantasy schemes dreamt up by minority pressure groups.
LazyTeenager says:
November 12, 2011 at 4:52 pm
People will not voluntarily pay for anything. And if you don’t pay the energy company for the energy you use the energy company will be employing the full force of the law.
===================================
Actually no – they just turn off your power.
Normally the claim is that you can save money and save the environment too. Those programs don’t usually do very well, because if people really wanted to save money that much, they would do so without being told. This plan was to save the environment by spending more, don’t expect that to work at all.
How much will the average American taxpayer end up paying because of the half billion dollars given to the green company Solyndra just before it failed? Only a few dollars per taxpayer? Think again. All that money was borrowed and tacked onto the national debt. Since only interest is ever paid on the debt and never any principle, Americans will be paying interest forever (or until the country goes bankrupt.) PG&E customers aren’t the only ones getting fleeced.
Is anyone keeping a tally of all the failed “carbon” measures? Offsets, sequestration, and so forth?
LazyTeenager says:
November 12, 2011 at 4:52 pm
The basis of your argument is completely flawed: You said “People will not voluntarily pay for anything” when what you should have correctly said is “People will not voluntarily pay for nothing“, and they shouldn’t! Because if a company has the power to force people to pay for something they don’t get, that’s highway robbery.
On the other hand, you’re correct that if you don’t pay the energy company for the energy you use, you’ll be just as bad and as big a thief as the company that forces you, like PG&E, to pay for nothing!
Time to use the full force of our votes to stop the insanity–and if we’re lucky, thinkers in California just may some day reach critical mass and throw their brain-dead politicians out of office. Of course, they may all end up homeless living under some bridge somewhere, too; if they don’t figure it out soon, that’s where they’ll end up.
[SNIP: If you need to be anonymous, choose another handle. You can also ditch the URL – visitors from that site rarely express the opinions you are voicing and makes your presence look like a false-flag operation. -REP]
Hey, after all the things said about the wacky Californians, it looks like most PG&E customers voted with their feet on this one. Interesting outcome . . .
” There’s a sucker born every minute”
” A fool and his/her money are easily parted”
@ur momisugly (many)
I know it is not necessary to buy renewable energy. I like it, so I am happy to be an early adopter and pay extra to be so.
For those that think it is just a scam, someone has to buy the electricity produced. These guys do (am sure there is a subsidy or two in there too), and sell it to those who want to buy it. I’m not sure where the scam is, or even could be, unless they demonstrably do not but renewable energy, which I doubt.
That tax price quoted is a lot more than I pay now. It is also forced on me, and will almost certainly NOT be buying renewable energy. I resent both of these facts, so stop paying voluntarily in protest.
I’ll say again, if those eco-‘worriers’ paid up voluntarily like I was prepared to do, and have done for many years, the problem would disappear. It is obvious their goal has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2, even for the truly concerned.
Selling carbon credits is the same as the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church to help forgive sins. Martin Luther objected. The rest is history.
We need a Martin Luther to get rid of this millstone round our necks that is this climate change taxation in all its many guises.
Gotta love this quote, one of the best denials of reality I’ve ever seen:
“It was a demonstration program, and it’s successfully concluding after meeting its goals,” Romans said. “Certainly we would have loved for more customers to have participated.” said company spokeswoman Katie Romans.
Not only a denial of reality, but extremely clumsy English as well.
LazyTeenager: “People will not voluntarily pay for anything.”
Ofcourse they are. People are willing to pay for the things they value. Where they have a sense of reasonable consideration for their outlay.
For example, we happily pay for new cars when we can afford to. More than that, people don’t just buy the cheapest car on the market, but pay 2, 3, or many times more than the cheapest price for the models they want. That’s what happens when people value what’s on offer.
And as Latitude says, people will even make contributions to charities with no obvious consideration in return. Same applies – they do do when they value the things their chosen charities do.
The problem with selling climate change is that nobody values the offering. Not even the small change of the price of a posh cup of coffee.
You could try standing on the street corner with a collection tin, shout “5 years to save the world from climate change, please give generously” and tell us how you get on. (Send your collection to some green energy project.
So if you are serious about saving the world, it might be more productive to get up off your lazy backside and start doing something about it. At a very minimum, the time you spend on that could save a few sour grapes comments.
RS says:
November 12, 2011 at 6:08 pm
“My wife says that it would have worked if the participants been given a huge special solar powered, brightly lit green halo over their home. We are talking visible for hundreds of feet, if not more.”
Good idea!!!
Hey, why not set each and every one of them up with “A solar powered, brightly lit green halo” over their heads ????
Do they earn interests? Or are you students?
What’s your principal principle?
😉
LazyTeenager says:
November 12, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Claude Harvey says
The bottom line in California appears to be the following: The majority of Californians will not VOLUNTARILY pay more for green energy, but the majority of Californians will VOTE for politicians who FORCE them to pay more for green energy.
————-
I believe its easy to understand and perfectly logical.
People are willing to contribute to the social good. But they are not willing to tolerate free loaders.
If they were truly unwilling to tolerate freeloaders, then subsidizing these “green” companies by paying more to help them maximize profits would quickly become anathema.
Jwerome said…Our extremely misguided government is about to impose a ruinous tax on us, a ‘Carbon Tax’. I will now refuse to buy renewable energy, as my taxes are now paying far more than I was voluntarily, and much less of that is going toward renewable energy and research. I also plan to reduce my tax bill in any way possible, in defence of this unwanted and unwarranted burden on my income.
===============
two weeks back i swapped to a g/teed NO renewable power co after 4 years with Red Energy
same reasons, if I am getting hit with the Liars carbon taxes, I sure am NOT going to support any renewable extra hikes etc.
hope she and the bobbit both crash and burn real soon.
Jer0me says:
November 13, 2011 at 12:57 am
“I’m not sure where the scam is, or even could be, unless they demonstrably do not but renewable energy, which I doubt.”
As I said, the energy generated through pumped hydro is sold as green renewable energy even when nuclear or fossil fuel power was used to pump the water uphill.
Second – by feeding the current crop of solar and wind producers you help them build up their lobbying organisations. There is no other industry in Germany that has better and more lobbying organisations than the subsidy-fed solar and wind energy industry.
They know exactly what they’re doing – they know their product cannot compete yet and their only chance for survival is to ramp up the fearmongering and the green hysteria to force governments to continue subsidizing them.
You are supporting these efforts.
Oh come one, can they really be this dumb?
From their FAQ pictured above:
With the help of over 30,000 PG&E residential and 700 business customers…
From the Metrics section:
30,000
Business and residential customers who joined the program.
30,000 + 700 = 30,000?
The best they could do on that statistic was one significant digit?
Another Metric:
226,000
The equivalent number of passenger cars off the road for a year.
The program ran almost 4 years, so that’s really about 57,000/yr.
Heck, they’ve gotten far more cars off of California roads than that, simply by driving away so many businesses and workers to more business-friendly states!
From what I can find, it appears PG&E has about 5,300,000 residential customers. So this program was supported by about 1/2 of 1% of their customers. I believe in most industries, a customer participation rate of 0.005% would be viewed as a total failure and lead to questions about whether the managers involved should be let go.