One irony of mandating renewable energy is that it isn’t necessarily any cleaner than coal. One example of this is North Carolina’s mandate for renewable energy derived from chicken litter waste. Chicken litter waste is composed of wood shavings and of course chicken droppings. There are plans to build a chicken litter waste plant in North Carolina and one has already been built in Minnesota.
As it turns out, burning chicken litter waste tends to produce a high level of particulates,…
Tucked into the EPA budget proposal the Obama administration revealed yesterdays are plans to reinstate the Superfund taxes which expired in 1995 as a way to partially offset the $2.7 billion in increased spending at the EPA. The administration estimates that the taxes will generate more than $1 billion per year.
The original Superfund taxes were actually three different taxes, a petroleum tax of 9.7 cents per barrel, a tax on chemical feedstocks, and a so called Corporate Environmental Income Tax…
Included in the massive stimulus bill that passed in the House of Representatives are several line items appropriations to renovate federal buildings in Washington. Included is $150 million to renovate a Smithsonian museum, $500 million for a new National Institutes of Health building, and $400 million for renovating a Social Security Administration building. For the renovation of the Social Security building, the agency estimates that the renovation will create 400 jobs. In other words, it will cost $1 million dollars…
The porcine stimulus bill passed by the House contains $15 billion in capital investments and loan guarantees for renewable energy projects and new electric transmission lines. But the billions of dollars targeted toward renewable energy aren’t likely to generate many “green collar” jobs anytime soon. That’s because the environmental and permitting regulations for these types of projects typically take years. This is particularly true for new transmission lines. And without the new transmission lines, new solar or wind power stations…
The appropriations portion of the House stimulus bill is not the only legislation with bad ideas. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has also marked up their portion of the stimulus package. During the Committee markup, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) inserted a provision that would “decouple” utility rates from the amount of electricity or natural gas that the utilities sell. According to the “decoupling” provision, states that accept federal energy efficiency grants from the economic stimulus package will have to…
In addition to tens of billions of dollars in the House stimulus bill for infrastructure and other projects to create jobs, there are also funding items that appear to do the exact opposite. For example, the House stimulus bill contains $175 million dollars for Natural Resource Conservation Service to purchase conservation easements in floodplains. Funding for the program would effectively be spending tax dollars to pay farmers to stop farming. Not only would such conservation easements not be creating any…
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Tucked in the massive stimulus bill passed by the House Appropriation Committee is a $4.5 billion appropriation for the Army Corps of Engineers. While the vast majority of the appropriation is for the construction of new water resource projects and for the backlog of maintenance of existing water resource projects, there is also a $25 million appropriation for the Corps of Engineers regulatory program. The Corps regulatory program is the cadre of bureaucrats responsible for processing…
Not all stimulus programs are created equal. If the goal of the latest economic bailout package that Congress is considering is as President Elect Obama has declared, job creation, there is a significant disparity between many of the programs. While only 39 of the variously appropriated federal programs even attempt to quantify the number of jobs that they would create, there is a huge disparity in how effective various programs are at job creation — ranging from $1,000,000 per job…
President Bush has declared an emergency in the District of Columbia for the inauguration of his successor. This unprecedented move will allow FEMA to reimburse state and local governments. In reality the DC government doesn’t really view the inaugural as an emergency so much as a reason to throw a giant 5 day party. In December the DC city council passed emergency legislation allowing all bars, restaurants, and nightclubs to serve alcohol until 5 am and to stay open for…
Following up on Angela’s post:
What is even more egregious about the Post article on Bisphenol A (BPA) is that it fails to put BPA exposure into the proper risk perspective. The principle reason that the National Toxicology Program was reviewing BPA is that its chemical structure is similar to that of estrogen. While this may sound ominous, what the Post article fails to mention is that we are constantly exposed to a variety of other estrogen mimicking compounds in our…
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