Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Vox has written a hilarious article about how giving people who love clean energy a choice about whether to use renewables would destroy the industry.
Ohio clean energy standards are toast unless Gov. John Kasich steps in to save them
The legislature wants to make them voluntary.
Updated by David Roberts david@vox.com Dec 13, 2016, 9:30am EST
Renewable energy is extremely popular with the American public, across partisan lines. The evidence is found not only in polls, but in tangible action at the state level: 29 states and Washington, DC, have passed some version of a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which requires state utilities to get a minimum percentage of their power from renewables.
Despite many attempts from fossil fuel companies, big utilities, and conservative groups, no RPS put in place has ever been repealed.
The closest any state has come was in 2014, when Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a law suspending the state’s clean energy mandates for two years.
Now that two years is up. But the Ohio legislature has just passed a bill that would make the RPS voluntary, effectively extending the suspension, for two more years. The bill is on Kasich’s desk; he will either sign it into law or veto it soon.
Kasich has said he wants to end the suspension. “I think we should embrace these renewables,” he told reporters on November 30. “We think these goals that were established for renewables, both solar and wind, can be met.” He added that “I just would hope the legislature will not have a headline that Ohio went backward on the environment.” However, he stopped short of saying he would veto the bill.
Now he’ll have to make that decision.
…
Read more: http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/13/13915236/ohio-clean-energy-mandates-kasich
Why does “popular” green energy require rigid government enforcement? Why can’t people be free to make their own choices? Surely if renewables are as popular as Vox claims, people don’t have to be coerced – they will embrace clean energy of their own free will?
Socialism is the fraudulent and deadly ideology that humanity will be better off when we each are force by the government to live at the expense of everyone else. A common thread in the thoughts of socialistic planners is that part of this improvement comes when humanity is also forced back into a far more primitive and agrarian existence, as if this will somehow cleanse humans of the desire to work hard and receive the fruits of their labors.
This would be a curiosity except that it sometimes reaches a level of the other-worldly like we saw when the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and forced city dwellers at gunpoint to live in the country, working on farms that were not prepared to feed, clothe or house them. This is one of the cause of the deaths of over a million people. I suspect that were social conditions different, today’s Greens in the west would be happy to oversee the deaths of millions in order to bring about their long awaited secular progressive Utopia.
Who would not love clean energy? Who would not love free healthcare, affordable housing, good weather and so on.
You could also ask who would not love reliable electricity 24/7 and reliable heating of your house.
The problem is that the cleanliness of the energy hardly differs except for CO2, which is not a poison, but the price tag is very different. All the fuzz is because the clean energy advocates say those who not buy it destroys the lives of others. A strong argument as old as all religions.
http://adrianvancearchive.blogspot.com/2016/12/co2-is-innocent.html?m=1
Check out this experiment proving CO2 doesn’t affect temperature as to what Climate Alarmists claim.
Eric asks: Why does “popular” green energy require rigid government enforcement? Why can’t people be free to make their own choices? Surely if renewables are as popular as Vox claims, people don’t have to be coerced – they will embrace clean energy of their own free will?
Back in the 1960’s (before the environmental movement), we allowed people discharge whatever they wanted into the air, water and landfills. That didn’t work so well: I moved to LA in 1970, where it hurt to take a deep breath of polluted air for the first few days and native Angelenos had smaller lung capacity than others. The Cuyahoga river was burning in Ohio. Toxic waste in the Love Canal probably produced birth defect in the people living above.
We have an EPA because people NEED to be coerced to prevent them from doing things that harm their neighbors. We have tried doing without regulations and it did NOT WORK.
The question is not whether we should regulate or not; the question is what regulations are worth their COST! Is the money we are spending on regulation providing REAL VALUE for citizens. What type of regulation produces the most value?
And the first step of that is criminal investigations and prosecutions for all the evironazis infesting EPA. Running all the regulations EPA has passed as laws through Congress for elimination or ratification is the next step.
2hotel9 wrote: “And the first step of that is criminal investigations and prosecutions for all the evironazis infesting EPA.”
How many environazis infesting the EPA have you personally dealt with?
2hotel9 also wrote: “Running all the regulations EPA has passed as laws through Congress for elimination or ratification is the next step.”
Congress already can’t complete its own work in a timely fashion, much less take on all of the minor rule making going on at the EPA. That is why Congress delegated rule-making authority to specialists in the executive branch. I do think Congress has delegated too broad an authority and progressives have been pushing past the boundaries of that authority. For example, when ozone destruction by CFCs, Congress amended the clean air act to define ozone-destorying substances as pollutants. The haven’t done so for CO2. The Supreme Court said that the early definition of pollutant made CO2 a pollutant.
Congress creates and ratifies laws, not EPA. And why are you defending the environazis infesting EPA? You one of them? You profit from the fake laws they put in place? Yes, prosecution and punishment, you seem to fear both.
Agree Frank.
But how do you balance the evil of dangerous pollution against the evil of dangerous abuse by the environmental bureaucracy? My own prejudice is that we have now tilted way too far in the direction of bureaucratic abuse and it is time to push back.
At the same time we need to listen to the environmental lobby and weigh their arguments because sometimes they are right.
Allanj: But how do you balance the evil of dangerous pollution against the evil of dangerous abuse by the environmental bureaucracy?
I think the only way is to convert benefits into dollars and measure regulatory costs in dollars. And then have political appointees who resolve disagreements (there will be many) using common sense, not preconceived political prejudice and input from many sources.
Frank: while you may be right, anyone can present their own interpretation of the cost benefit analysis.
Jeff: The top managers should think of themselves as venture capitalists: A new proposed regulation is an opportunity to earn a great deal of money (benefits to Americans) if they work as expected. (Investing in projects that will barely break even is a waste of time and money.) How sure are we that those benefits can be obtained for the amount of money we will need to invest? Is a demonstration project the right place to start?
To ensure this kind of thinking, I’d put a cap the number of pages in the Federal Register of Regulations and demand that the bureaucracy spend half its time eliminating regulations that have failed to achieve their goals and focus only on the minimum new regulation needed to solve a problem,
That is too simple, need to have a complete historical analysis. Work, not as fast as it got, was in progress to clean up the Houston Ship Channel in the 1950s. We sampled it, metabolically dead, best we could tell. Still not perfect, but fish now swim the length. Oysters in Galveston Bay sometimes tasted like oil which was part of the pushback. They were only some of the neighbors.
Anthony, a bit of housekeeping. I keep getting a security warning when I come to your webpage about “mega.vast.mega-tags.com” and occasionally I get a redirect to a page claiming to be a survey from my local internet service company and my security flags as malware. My supplier, CenturyLink, says it ain’t them and I should let you know in case it is something you can squash from your end.
When I go to the sea ice page I get a window that says Authorization Required:
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com is requesting your username and password.
I can delete it but it keeps popping up again & again…
Looks like you are dealing with NOAA
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/ssmi-ssmis-hydrological-products-monthly-2-5-degree-gridded/resource/83a1b79f-cfb5-4b41-bf37-1580aaf656d1
I do not get what you say, so you will have to investigate.
Maybe it is you:
http://www.sitealyzer.net/en/p/sb/remove-mega.vast.mega-tags.com/
This page shows how to remove mega.vast.mega-tags from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Yeah, whenever you get a strange website or program wanting to do things on your computer, you should do a search on it and you will probably find you are infected with a virus of some kind.
The reason I use the Firefox browser and NoScript is to prevent these programs and rogue websites from executing anything on my computer.
NoScript first blocks all scripts from executing on a new webpage, and gives me a list of all the websites that are trying to put stuff on the website I am visiting and I can enable them, if I need their functionality, or leave them disabled. Leaving them disabled significantly speeds up the loading of the webpage usually.
I also have a program that runs all the time and prevents anything from being installed permanently on my harddrive. It saved my bacon one time when I accidentally got some ransomware on my computer while running Internet Explorer.
The Ransomware took over the whole screen and would not allow me to do anything to remove it. But when I rebooted, my little watchdog program noted the new installation and asked me if I wanted to keep it or not, and I said NOT!, and that was the end of that. No more problems. 🙂
Internet Explorer is unsafe. I guess they have a new browser out now, but I’m not using Windows 10, so I don’t use it. I suspect the new browser is probably a lot like the old one. I would do Chrome, but I don’t trust Google. 🙂
Yep, they get blocked, well, the redirected page I have to close and start over with a new tab. Firefox has been pretty good for me, and ESET is working well. I have had a couple of problems with NASA pages wanting a strange login or being blocked as unsecure, usually I just close the page and start over and it loads. The vagaries of Algore:Thegoreacle’s intratubes thingy.
Thanks, I’ll check that out. It does not come up on any other webpages, it has popped up here 4 times in as many seconds just now. ESET anti-virus blocks it, I just have to hit the block tab. The redirect page does not happen as often, still, only here. Quite annoying.
The EU includes hydro in its green energy mix and the US should too. It would become equal with others in mandated purchase and even given reason for priority being affordable. Removal of subsidies for solar and wind would let free markets work.
Jon, the organized greens in the US hate hydro, and are on a dam removal kick, so therefore, hydro cannot be “renewable” as it is not sufficiently green.
“the organized greens…”
AKA “the human haters club”.
Perhaps we could see a new ecology movement form which is more focused on actual environmental problems in specific localities which can be remediated by engineering or changed practices.
There is also the ecology of the humanist.
It would be an interesting organizing effort. As a curiousity, the first environmental degradation articles I ever read were a series in “The American Rifleman”, the NRA magazine that my grandfather subscribed to, against stream channelization by the Army Corps of Engineers on the basis it ruined hunting habitat. There are people other than watermelons who care about the environment.
“There are people other than watermelons who care about the environment.”
Watermelons don’t care about the environment. It’s just a tool to bring them power.
Jeez, you’d a thunk that Gov. John Kasich, after getting his ass handed to him by Trump in the Republican primary, would have learned a lesson about being bold. Nope, he’s right back home in play-it-safe land, and can’t muster enough balls to tell the economically stupid politically correct class to shove it where the wind don’t blow, er, correction, where the sun don’t shine.
No Kasich for president in the future, for me.
What the hell is “renewable” about crappy wind and solar? You have to use fossil fuels to mine the materials, manufacture, transport, erect and scrap them.
In believers’ heads they seem to just ‘pop up’ all around the countryside. Cool whirligigs that actually make a little power sometimes. Boy, they look novel for a while…
The EU are going to use DIESEL generators for back up in order to keep the lights on across Europe once they are completely “green” and the idiots in Brussel’s fail to see the irony. Now would be a good time to buy shares in a diesel generator manufacturing company in the USA.
They should get wise and put in gas turbines.
“Get wise”? This is the EU I’m talking about……run by unelected idiots!
Conceded! LOL
(I know this site has an international audience. “Liberal” in this quote is not about a political party but rather a mind set.)
This reminds of a quote, “A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to their fellowman and is determined to pay that debt using your money.”
Americans, people, just like the rest of the world, have shown their willingness to voluntarily donate to those in genuine need. Those with the means have done so time and time again.
The problem is when those liberals with authority have decided to make “donations” involuntary. (Welfare, “Entitlements”, Obamacare)
This is a similar situation. “They” don’t want to give people the choice. They want to mandate it. “They” know better.
60 million voters cat ballots for Hillary and green energy that was/is subsidized by the other 240 million that did not. Let’s see if any of those 60 million will put their money where the politics are and voluntarily pay 3-4 times higher electricity rates.
In Australia, the electricity retailers provide an option for customers to choose “green” sourcing for their power (no explanation at all on how this would be achieved with a single grid). The uptake is now about 0.5%.
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/01/australians-dont-want-to-pay-more-for-green-power-what-was-a-pitiful-1-of-the-grid-shrank-by-half/
Renewables extrememly popular? I cannot believe that Americans are so radically different from Australians. These “progressive” idiots live in a closed thought bubble.
The real explanation:
Because 99.99% of people don’t care about electricity or where it comes from. When is the last time you even read your bill? What are the units of electricity called? How much of your electricity bill is actually charges for natural gas?
Voluntary programs to buy wind have been around for decades. They’re very cheap. Nobody participates because they don’t know the programs exist – because they don’t open their bills.
“They’re very cheap.” Maybe so, but still more than not buying wind.
Right now my local electrical provider is selling electricity for $0.04167/kWh. Wind( or ‘green’) power is sold for an additional $0.0167/kWh (sold in 300 kWh chunks, so if you don’t use the whole 300kWh chunk at the end of the month, the actually /kWh cost goes up). That is a 40% mark up. I wouldn’t call that cheap.
I would be interested to see how many people actually signed up to pay more for there electricity.
“………Why does “popular” green energy require rigid government enforcement? Why can’t people be free to make their own choices? Surely if renewables are as popular as Vox claims, people don’t have to be coerced – they will embrace clean energy of their own free will?….”
Good questions. In my mind, the first thing the followers of this website should do when you encounter a greenie fossil fuels basher is to ask him/her if he or she has eliminated the demand for fossil fuels in his/her life. Chances are the answer will be ‘no’. They almost have no choice but to admit to their hypocrisy. And why is that? Because they are not enlightened enough to realize that they are doing things bass ackwards. A post-fossil fuels era will only come into being someday AFTER the technologies (one of which we have now—–nuclear) are found and phased into widespread use. A simple look back at history helps us to understand this….
We humans phased out the horse-and-buggy days AFTER the automobile was invented and came into widespread use, not before. We ushered in the current widespread age of commercial air travel AFTER we invented the jet engine and jet aircraft, not before. We ushered in the age of space travel and artificial satellites AFTER we invented the rocket engine, not before. We ushered in the age of information technology AFTER we invented the computer and digital technology, not before. We ushed in the age of wireless personal communications AFTER we invented cellular technology, not before. And on and on and on…….
Whether the fossil fuel bashers like it or not, the generation of energy in any form is and always will be a scientific, engineering and technological issue, not a eco-religious one. The invention of an anti-fossil fuels religious movement appears to have been created in the absence of any of this really being understood or taken seriously. Hence we have the fossil fuel bashers’ hypocrisy where they cannot deny a dependency on fossil fuels in their own lives. When one adds in their failure to understand or accept that “clean energy” technologies like wind and solar cannot be realistically and economically scaled up to meet our electrical energy needs, the dunce hat on their heads gets even larger.
It is truly both funny and frustrating when “clean energy” writer-advocates at VOX and other greenie websites pitch their snake oil to us in a vacuum that seems to be significantly devoid of science, engineering, economics and acceptance of this lesson from history. Whether Trump will enlighten the masses in any these areas remains to be seen.
It’s all rather simple. If you want to be green for whatever reason then you can pay for it. In the meantime stop forcing it on everyone. It’s abusive.
“Renewable energy is extremely popular with the American public, across partisan lines. The evidence is found not only in polls, but in tangible action at the state level” Just because the states pass such garbage doesn’t automatically translate into the American public finding it extremely popular especially if said state is lead by liberals. And again I don’t recall polls showing the American public in love being forced to pay higher utility rates to support alternate energy. The only acceptable approach to solar or wind energy is for the individual property owner to purchase the system for their own use and sell excess back to the local utility.
Why does “popular” green energy require rigid government enforcement? Why can’t people be free to make their own choices?
Simply, it can’t. ‘Green energy’ doesn’t exist in any real way. Not without stupid governments taking your cash in order to keep the scam going.
“he AEPS says Ohio’s utilities have to get 25 percent of their energy from “advanced” sources by 2025. Advanced includes nuclear, “clean coal,” and combined heat and power (CHP), among other things.”
Public utilities are regulated and provide power as directed by state legislatures and the PUC. If people in Ohio demand it, the utilities will pass the cost along the cost.
Yep, green toast… part of that magical mythical meal, green eggs and ham. 🙂
LENR is on track to start becoming commercial next year. Rossi in February and BLP at the end of 2017.
When this surfaces to debate will disappear and solar and wind will die..
Renewables are “extremely popular” with the portion of the American public who don’t understand the issues. That is until they are asked to pay for them. Everyone likes the concept of renewables, but no one wants to pay.
I believe there is a fair amount of fracking happening in Ohio. Further, I believe that fracking has significantly helped the economy in Ohio including jobs and tax revenue. And the differences between Trump and Clinton on fossil fuels were a significant reason why Trump carried Ohio.
Meanwhile in Michigan
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/19/michigan-calls-15-renewable-electricity-2021/
And yet another entry from fakenews-R-us from griffie.
Griff probably try reading the article rather than just the headline. I don’t see any win for renewables 🙂
There is also a warning that if Trump axes the incentives even that small change is probably dead.
Do you really just spend all your time internet searching headlines for random articles you clearly haven’t read? It is pretty obvious you only read the headlines never bothering to actually read the article.
That is why you make stupid mistakes like trying to tell us that the EPA was the one who discovered the Volkswagen scam. The headline was the EPA prosecuted them but they had absolutely nothing to do with the discovery.
So before you post anymore stupid articles we would like you to give us a brief of why you think it is good or bad so we know you have read the article. Start with you article above what do you consider good about it? Sorry I really do doubt you read it.