clean energy

Obama’s State of the Union: A Blueprint for Crony Capitalism and Costly Educational Failures

by Hans Bader on January 26, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for even more spending on his cronies — what he euphemistically referred to as “investments” in “clean energy technology.” Such spending benefits companies that donate millions to liberal politicians, like GE,  which recently spent  $65.7 million on lobbying to extract special favors from the government.

As the Washington Post notes, GE received massive taxpayer bailouts on special, preferential terms not available to other companies:

General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program.  .  .But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.

GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is the “Chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.”

The “clean energy” spending Obama wants includes “initiatives aimed at building the renewable-energy sector — which received billions of dollars in stimulus funding.”

This is a bad sign for American workers, because such green jobs programs have wiped out thousands of American jobs in the past.  The $800 billion stimulus package used “green-jobs” subsidies to send American jobs overseas.  79 percent of those subsidies went to foreign firms, such as an Australian firm that imported Japanese wind turbines, effectively outsourcing American jobs.  (The stimulus package also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector.)  Moreover, some “green jobs” funding actually damages the environment, like ethanol subsidies:  ethanol mandates actually harm the environment, yet the Obama administration apparently considers them to be a “green jobs” program.

Echoing earlier reports that he would advocate “new government spending” on education, Obama attacked the idea of scaling back massive increases in education spending. He called cutting education spending “like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine.” Lost in his hyperbole was the fact that America already spends much more per capita on education than most other wealthy industrialized countries, with worse results.  As spending has exploded, college students are spending much less time studying and reading than they used to.

Dumping more money on the educational system is unlikely to spur economic growth, since so many college students learn little in college, are not interested in learning, and only go to college in order to get paper credentials rather than an education. Obama wants all Americans to attend at least one year of college, saying in his address that “higher education must be within reach of every American.”

Those paper credentials are increasingly useless to many who obtain them.  Most people who went to college because of rising college-attendance rates in recent years wound up in unskilled jobs (including 5,057 janitors who have Ph.D’s or other advanced degrees), while tuition skyrockets. (100 colleges charge at least $50,000 a year, compared to five in 2008-09.)  Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation, while Obama seeks to double it.

Colleges are so awash in money that many elite colleges are using it to rapidly expand educational bureaucracies.  For example, Wake Forest University increased spending on administrators by 600 percent.

Unlike other countries, which focus on educating engineers and other economically-productive occupations, America focuses on superficial, ideologically-fashionable liberal-arts majors.  The Obama administration seems more concerned about the gender ratios in college science departments than the small number of Americans who go into science, and is now contemplating caps on the number of male science students under Title IX to promote what it perceives as gender equity.  Such caps would be based on the Obama administration’s faulty interpretation of Title IX.

Firing Blanks on FOIA Part II

by Iain Murray on September 17, 2009

in Economy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International, Regulation

In his update to his post, Declan McCullagh notes an objection by the Center for American Progress:

The fourth objection is the most compelling. The Center for American Progress writes: “The potential benefits of clean energy legislation far outweigh the modest costs.” That’s a reasonable cost vs. benefit calculation, and it includes the claim that even with the extra taxes, cap and trade is so vital to America, it’s still worth it.

That’s the right approach to take: it would be a very good thing if all federal regulation were subject to a cost vs. benefit analysis. For example, if rising temperatures are significantly harming the planet, and cap and trade would reduce greenhouse gases enough to slow the rise, that would be a real benefit. But the Center for American Progress never actually makes that argument, and as CEI senior fellow Christopher Horner says: “Nobody has ever said this will change the temperature. It won’t.”

Well, we’ve already covered that one.  Even taking the most favorable analysis to WaxKey, the costs to Americans massively outweigh the benefits to them.  Here’s my post from a week ago:

There’s a new cost:benefit study from New York University Law School’s Institute for Public Integrity that, its authors claim, shows that, “From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 [Waxman-Markey] is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet.”  A good investment for the US? Really?

The authors recognize that the benefits they find are global, while the costs are located in the US.  So let’s see what benefits accrue to US citizens and at what cost. (I am working with the authors’ figures here, which derive from the EPA, and are significantly different from the figures provided by such groups as the Heritage Foundation or the American Council for Capital Formation, which find much, much higher costs.)

Highest possible benefit = $5.2 trillion / 6 billion people = benefits of $866 per person

Cost to US citizen = $660 billion / 300 million people = cost of $2200 per citizen

That means a best possible benefit to cost ratio for a US citizen of 0.4:1.

The report talks about thinking of the Waxman-Markey costs as a “highly effective, highly leveraged form of foreign aid.”  One has to doubt that, given that the benefits that accrue to the developing world do so mostly in the far future, while the developing world is in desperate need of greater wealth – and better access to energy – today.  Even if it were true, however, one wonders whether the American public will accept a de facto tax increase of around $1300 per person, or $400 billion total, to pay for such climate aid.

Yet that’s assuming that the “high end” benefits scenario is what occurs.  The global low end benefits are actually far outweighed by the American costs, leading to a benefit:cost ratio to America of something in the order of 0.05:1 (or a cost:benefit ratio of 20:1).

And, of course, there’s no guarantee that a reduction in American emissions will amount to a reduction in global emissions.  We have seen the response to European cap-and-trade schemes being the relocation of facilities to other jurisdictions.  If so, the effective foreign aid program of Waxman-Markey might actually be a loss of American jobs to be replaced by developing world jobs, with no emissions reduction at all.  That would be very generous of us, but not quite what the authors of this study have in mind.

To summarize, the authors of the study have conclusively demonstrated that the Waxman-Markey bill is actually a very bad deal for the United States, and their attempts to claim otherwise are just spin.

Blowing Sunshine

by Iain Murray on July 7, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Stimulus to Nowhere

Apologies for the late notice, but I had an article on the potential of solar power in last Friday’s Washington Examiner:

If the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed narrowly in the House of Representatives this week, also passes the Senate, does this mean that we’ll soon replace coal-derived electricity with clean and green solar power? Don’t count on it. Solar has a lot of problems, and those relying on it for the promised “green jobs” will probably be let down.

You might also be interested in the levelized cost-comparisons for building new power plants in 2016 from the Energy Information Administration, helpfully compiled by the Institute for Energy Research.  The cheapest form of energy (assuming a cost of carbon at $15 a ton)? Nuclear.  The most expensive? Solar thermal and solar photovoltaic.

Renewable Energy Not Necessarily Cleaner Than Coal

by Jonathan Tolman on April 13, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming

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, high levels of carbon monoxide, high levels of nitrogen oxides, and a high level of arsenic.  The reason the plants produce high levels of particulates and carbon monoxide is because the wood shavings don’t burn as hot as coal and so there is often incomplete combustion.  The high levels of nitrogen oxides come from the fact the chicken waste is high in ammonia and urea.  In fact, chicken waste is often used as a source of nitrogen fertilizer on farms.   The reason for the high levels of arsenic is that most commercial chicken feed contains Roxarsone, which is an arsenic based compound that is added to the chicken feed to prevent the birds from developing parasites.

The emissions at the Minnesota plant are apparently so problematic the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency  has pending legal action.  So much for clean green renewable energy.