Voice For Liberty

Category: Environment

  • Green Jobs: Fact or Fiction

    One of the seemingly compelling arguments made by proponents of green energy is that the shift to different types of energy production would create many jobs and be good for the economy. This argument is particularly appealing right now, as job losses are stacking up.

    The article Green Jobs: Fact or Fiction examines four studies that promote green jobs as a way to benefit the economy. All have problems, falling into a few general categories:

    1. Mistaking a labor-intensive energy sector as the goal, rather than efficient energy provision.
    “It is a sign of increased efficiency if more energy can be produced and delivered with fewer workers, because this expands the overall output potential of the economy. Yet the green jobs studies that we analyze in this report reach the opposite conclusion, and favor energy sources that require more workers to yield a given amount of energy.”

    2. Counting job creation but ignoring job destruction.
    “Even if job creation per se is the goal, the studies fail to properly account for the job destruction that their recommendations would entail.”

    3. Double counting of jobs and overly simplistic treatment of the labor market.
    “The thinking is that the workers going into the new green jobs will simply reduce the unemployment rate, rather than siphoning talented people away from other industries.”

    4. Ignoring the role of the private sector.
    “No consideration appears to have been given to the fact that government cannot direct the labor and capital markets more efficiently than market wage and interest rates.”

  • A Cautionary Note for Kansas Wind Power

    A piece in the Wall Street Journal contains some useful information that we should keep in mind as we consider the future of energy in Kansas, even though the focus of the column is the debate over wind power on Nantucket Sound. (Blowhards, January 24, 2009).

    One thing is the hypocrisy of “green” power proponents:

    Bill Delahunt, the windy Cape Democrat, also denounced the action as “a $2 billion project that depends on significant taxpayer subsidies while potentially doubling power costs for the region.” … Good to see the Congressman now recognizes the limitations of green tech, such as its tendency to boost consumer electricity prices — but his makeover as taxpayer champion is a bit belated. Green energy has been on the subsidy take for years, including in 2005 when Mr. Delahunt was calling for “an Apollo project for alternative energy sources, for hybrid engines, for biodiesel, for wind and solar and everything else.” The reality is that all such projects are only commercially viable because of political patronage.

    This column informs us of the subsidy that wind power receives.

    Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf ran the numbers and found that the effective tax rate for wind is minus 163.8%. In other words, every dollar a wind firm spends is subsidized to the tune of 64 cents from the government. The Energy Information Administration estimates that wind receives $23.37 in government benefits per megawatt hour — compared to, say, 44 cents for coal.

    This directly contradicts an incoherent comment left on this blog a while ago, which claimed that coal power received huge subsidies compare to wind.

    Background: The subsidy report referred to is TAXING ENERGY IN THE UNITED STATES: Which Fuels Does the Tax Code Favor?

  • Another Misleading Question by GPACE

    Yesterday we saw how the website of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy contains a list of ten questions for Sunflower supporters. My post GPACE “Sunflower” Questions Misleading showed how these questions are designed to influence public opinion in a very misleading manner.

    One of the ways some of the questions are misleading is that they’re based on a false premise (or two). Here’s question number eight, which provides another example: “How is it a good idea for the part-time, partisan Kansas Legislature to be responsible for thousands of annual permit requests and for enforcing compliance, in addition to other priorities and constitutional duties?”

    This question is based on this premise: that because a majority of Kansas legislators want to overrule one decision made by Rod Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the legislature wants to be responsible for all decisions made by KDHE.

    That’s quite a leap of logic, and one unsupported by any public statement by any member of the legislature that I’ve seen. This question is obviously designed to evoke a specific response unsupported by facts. It’s misleading.

    Here’s something else: The use of the word partisan in describing the legislature. This is designed to convince people that the action taken by the legislature was tainted because it was based on political considerations, rather than other considerations of a higher order such as, say, scientific evidence.

    The reality is that the Sunflower electrical plant permit was approved by the professional staff of KDHE. It was KDHE Secretary Rod Bremby, a political appointee of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who decided to overrule his staff and deny the permit. That sounds like partisan action to me.

    GPACE’s website states “GPACE seeks to correct an imbalance in the information citizens and their elected representatives have received regarding the critical and complex energy policy decisions facing our state.” From what we’ve seen so far, GPACE’s misleading and loaded questions contribute to misinformation rather than balance.

  • GPACE “Sunflower” Questions Misleading

    The website of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy contains a list of ten questions for Sunflower supporters.

    (It seems if you’re an environmentalist, the term “Sunflower” is enough to let you know what these questions are about. For normal Kansans, though, they’ll need a little more information. These questions refer to Sunflower Electric Power Corporation and its proposed expansion of the Holcomb Station coal-fired power plant. Or, simply, “the coal plant.”)

    When I read these questions, they reminded me of questions used in push polls. These questions — not really questions at all — are designed to produce a change in the views of the respondent. They are often based on a false premise, but sound reasonable or tenable. That’s the case with many of these ten questions.

    For example, here’s the first question: “How is the use of our scarce (and hard earned) water resource to produce electricity for Colorado good economic policy for western Kansas?”

    Now if you didn’t know much about this issue, you might conclude these things from this question: That the plant will use a lot of additional water that Kansas can’t spare, that western Kansas exists only to serve the selfish interests of Colorado, and that exporting electricity to Colorado isn’t a benefit to Kansas.

    Here’s some of the things wrong with this question: First, the premise that the power plant will use a lot of water is false. That’s because the plant has to purchase water rights for the water it will use. If the power plant didn’t use this water, it would likely be used in agriculture, probably irrigating corn to be fed to cattle or turned into ethanol.

    Besides, the water usage of the plant is very small compared to the use of water in Kansas agriculture. My post Holcomb, Kansas Coal Plant Water Usage in Perspective explains.

    Then, what’s bad about exporting power to Colorado or other states? Don’t we in Kansas spend a lot of effort producing oil, natural gas, wheat, beef, and airplanes just for export to other states? How is electricity different? Has Kansas started a trade war with Colorado?

    It’s true that the Wichita Eagle’s Rhonda Holman complained that the plant would export power “while leaving Kansas with 100 percent of the carbon dioxide.” (See Untruths About Carbon and its Regulation at the Wichita Eagle) Her complaint is based on a false premise. I know of no authority — not even Al Gore — that believes that carbon dioxide pollution is a problem in the local vicinity of a power plant. To the extent that carbon emissions are a problem — and that’s a mighty big “if” — it’s a problem on a global scale.

    Some of the other questions posed by GPACE have similar problems. This technique of pushing questions based on false premises does nothing to promote reasoned discussion of issues in Kansas.

  • Wind power: look at costs of “boom”

    There’s been a lot of investment in Nolan County, Texas. Things are booming.

    That’s pretty much the entire point of an op-ed piece in the Wichita Eagle by Scott Allegrucci. (Money Blowing in the Wind in Texas, January 16, 2009)

    He’s the director of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy, based in Topeka. This organization’s website states that “GPACE seeks to correct an imbalance in the information citizens and their elected representatives have received regarding the critical and complex energy policy decisions facing our state.”

    If that’s really GPACE’s goal, Mr. Allegrucci didn’t advance it in this piece. That’s because he promotes the benefits of spending on wind energy without considering the true cost of wind energy. Further, he ignores the tremendous subsidy poured into wind energy production.

    Last year the Texas Public Policy Foundation released a report titled Texas Wind Energy: Past, Present, and Future. This report contains information about the realities of wind power. It provides the balance that GPACE says it seeks to provide but fails to deliver in Mr. Allegrucci’s op-ed.

    For example, did you know that every bit of wind power that’s produced receives a subsidy? Last year, as the subsidy was about to expire, wind power advocates warned that without the subsidy, wind power production would cease. No new plants would be built. It’s these subsidies that have created the growth in Nolan County that Allegrucci writes about. These subsidies produce some peculiar incentives. From page 25 of TPPF’s report:

    The financial handouts available to wind developers are so generous that, in Texas, many wind-energy producers “will offer wind power at no cost or even pay to have their electricity moved on the grid, a response commonly referred to as ‘negative pricing.’ Wind providers have an incentive to sell power even at negative prices because they still receive the federal production tax (PTC) credit and renewable energy credits.”

    Directing subsidies of any type into a concentrated area produces the results described by Allegrucci in this county. There’s nothing remarkable about that. But what about the rest of Texas? From the executive summary of the TPPF report:

    The distinction between wind and wind energy is critical. The wind itself is free, but wind energy is anything but. Cost estimates for wind-energy generation typically include only turbine construction and maintenance. Left out are many of wind energy’s costs — transmission, grid connection and management, and backup generation — that ultimately will be borne by Texas’ electric ratepayers. Direct subsidies, tax breaks, and increased production and ancillary costs associated with wind energy could cost Texas more than $4 billion per year and at least $60 billion through 2025.

    It’s a common error, assuming that since no one owns the wind, wind power is free once the turbines are built. That’s far from the case, though. Page 23 tells us this:

    The true cost of electricity from wind is much higher than wind advocates admit. Wind energy advocates ignore key elements of the true cost of electricity from wind, including: (i) The cost of tax breaks and subsidies which shift tax burden and costs from “wind farm” owners to ordinary taxpayers and electricity customers. (ii) The cost of providing backup power to balance the intermittent and volatile output from wind turbines. (iii) The full, true cost of transmitting electricity from “wind farms” to electricity customers and the extra burden on grid management.

    The reality is that the boom in Nolan County is being paid for by electricity customers throughout Texas. Not by their choice, too.

    When considering wind power, balance requires us to consider these factors. The illustration that a concentrated area experiences a boom from a subsidized, expensive, and unreliable source of power doesn’t paint a picture of sound public policy.

  • Tom Nelson, Climate Change Information Center

    Meet Tom Nelson, a valuable resource for information about climate change. His self-named blog — Tom Nelson — consolidates a wide variety of material that you won’t find on the websites of the “warmists.”

  • A reasoned look at wind power

    The Texas Public Policy Foundation has released a report titled Texas Wind Energy: Past, Present, and Future. It doesn’t have a catchy title, but the report is full of useful information about wind energy. Here’s a little bit from the executive summary:

    The distinction between wind and wind energy is critical. The wind itself is free, but wind energy is anything but. Cost estimates for wind-energy generation typically include only turbine construction and maintenance. Left out are many of wind energy’s costs—transmission, grid connection and management, and backup generation—that ultimately will be borne by Texas’ electric ratepayers. Direct subsidies, tax breaks, and increased production and ancillary costs associated with wind energy could cost Texas more than $4 billion per year and at least $60 billion through 2025.

    Wind, like every other energy resource, has its pros and cons, and there is no doubt that wind power should be part of Texas’ energy supply. Texas needs a variety of fuel sources, plus concerted efforts at conservation and efficiency, in order to meet its energy needs. However, wind energy should only be employed to the extent it passes economic cost-benefit muster. Instead of subsidizing private wind development and imposing billions of dollars in new transmission costs upon retail electric customers, Texas policymakers should step back and allow the energy marketplace to bring wind power online when the market is ready. Texas electricity consumers will reap the benefits of such a prudent path.

  • Attitudes towards global warming are changing

    Global warming alarmists — in this article Christopher Booker refers to them simply as “warmists” — have become “even shriller and more frantic” in light of evidence that climate change may not be proceeding they way they’ve been predicting.

    In his article in the Daily Telegraph (2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved), Booker makes these points:

    Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

    First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare.

    Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed.

    Thirdly … All those grandiose projects for “emissions trading”, “carbon capture”, building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to “biofuels”, are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

    In Kansas we’re considering taking very expensive actions to mitigate carbon emissions. (See coverage of Kansas Energy and Environmental Policy Advisory Group (KEEP), for example.) These actions, in the global scheme of things (and it’s not called “global warming” for nothing), are less than the proverbial drop in the bucket. At the same time, we delay doing things that we need, like the expansion of the Holcomb Station coal-fired electricity generating plant. Let’s hope that 2009 brings a reasoned and measured response to the hysteria generated by the “warmists.”

  • Global warming rope-a-dope

    Walter Williams reports that the science behind global warming is not as solid as alarmists and zealots present it to be.

    The scientists, not environmental activists, include Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in physics, who said, “I am a skeptic. … Global warming has become a new religion.” Kiminori Itoh, an environmental physical chemist, said warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history. … When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” … Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, said, “Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly [from promoting warming fears], without having their professional careers ruined.”

    The problem is, as Williams says: “The global warming scare has provided a field day for politicians and others who wish to control our lives. After all, only the imagination limits the kind of laws and restrictions that can be written in the name of saving the planet.” And once laws are in place, Williams says, they’re very difficult to remove, no matter how strong the evidence is of their harm.

    Global warming alarmists pursue their agenda with zeal, and usually with no consideration as to the harmful effects of their policies. If uncontrovertible evidence that global warming is a mistake were to appear, would it make any difference to them? Of course not. Their crusade, which in reality is a thinly-disguised campaign against capitalism, would continue.

    For Dr. Williams’ column, see Global Warming Rope-a-Dope.