Big winners from Biden's climate law: Republicans who voted against it
They didn’t vote for it, they don’t like it and they’re working to undermine it — but Republicans are reaping the benefits of Democrats’ climate law.
In the five months since the Inflation Reduction Act became law, companies have announced tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle projects that will benefit from incentives in President Joe Biden’s signature law, aimed at expanding domestic manufacturing in clean energy and reducing dependence on Chinese imports.
In fact, roughly two-thirds of the major projects are in districts whose Republican lawmakers opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a POLITICO analysis of major green energy manufacturing announcements made since the bill’s enactment.
The dynamic has prompted a tricky balancing act for the GOP: Tout the jobs and economic benefits coming to their states and districts, but not the bill that helped create them. The results are also potentially awkward for Democrats who expended political capital and more than a year of wrangling to enact the bill, only to see Republican lawmakers and governors sharing in the jobs and positive headlines it’s creating — although Democrats say they also see longer-term benefits for the nation in building GOP support for alternatives to fossil fuels.
Republicans insist their positions on the bill and the jobs are not in conflict.
“Just because you vote against a bill doesn’t mean the entire bill is a bad bill,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who was the top GOP member of Democrats’ Select Climate Crisis Committee in the last Congress. “I go out there and advocate for our district to try and get transportation funds, to try and get energy funds. That’s my job. I am not embarrassed about it. I don’t think it’s inconsistent with my vote.”
To Democrats, the slate of new investments stand as proof that they were correct that the Inflation Reduction Act, H.R. 5376 (117), would expand the reach of clean power to rural and conservative areas — a promise that failed to sway a single Republican vote to support the bill.
“It’s hard not to point out the hypocrisy for people who fought tooth and nail against the bill, those very incentives that are now creating opportunities in their [Republican] districts they are now leading,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.). “We just have to point out, thanks for your kind words, but this didn’t just happen. It happened despite your best efforts.”
Smith attended an October ribbon-cutting in her state for Canadian solar panel maker Heliene’s expansion of its manufacturing facility — an effort that was started prior to the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage and that has drawn praise from Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), whose district is home to the plant that will be one of the largest panel makers in the country.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm welcomed the news that Republican districts were drawing the investments. “Great, that is fantastic,” she told reporters at the Monday White House briefing. “We want to be able to see energy — clean energy — produced in every pocket of the country. Blue states, red states, really it helps to save people money, so it’s all about green.”
Democrats’ climate law includes billions of dollars to spur green energy technologies and cut greenhouse gas emissions, including a new tax credit for manufacturing the components crucial for solar, wind and electric vehicles, as well as additional incentives for using domestic content in projects.
Republicans, though, have moved to slash funding of the Internal Revenue Service, the central agency charged with implementing the climate law’s incentives, over concerns that Democrats have expanded its mandate. And Friday, former President Donald Trump urged GOP lawmakers to target “billions being spent on climate extremism” in their fight over the debt limit.
Supporters of the Inflation Reduction Act say its success is due in part to the way it provides long-term certainty for companies looking to place a footprint in the U.S.
The bill is a “fundamental element” of the recent spate of manufacturing announcements, said Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “There certainly were a number of plans being evaluated and discussed [prior to the bill]. But I think the vast majority were contingent upon the passage of the IRA.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/23/red-states-are-winning-big-from-dems-climate-law-00078420
**************************************************Giant Wind Turbines Falling Over
A rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions are occurring across the U.S. and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses. Some industry veterans say they’re happening more often, even if the events are occurring at only a small fraction of installed machines. This article opens with an account of a remarkable failure in Oklahoma:
On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene. The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.
This article reports that the race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain,” GE CEO Larry Culp said on an earnings call in October. “It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products.”
************************************************
Evidence Says Offshore Wind Development Is Killing Lots of Whales
The recent deaths of seven whales off New Jersey, mostly humpbacks, got a lot of attention. The federal NOAA Fisheries agency is responsible for whales. An outrageous statement by their spokesperson got me to do some research on humpback whale deaths.
The results are appalling. The evidence seems clear that offshore wind development is killing whales by the hundreds. Here is the statement as reported in the press:
“NOAA said it has been studying what it calls “unusual mortality events” involving 174 humpback whales along the East Coast since January 2016. Agency spokesperson Lauren Gaches said that period pre-dates offshore wind preparation activities in the region.” Gaches is NOAA Fisheries press chief.
The “unusual mortality” data is astounding. Basically the humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016 and continued high thereafter. You can see it here.
But the claim that this huge jump in mortality predates offshore wind preparation activities is wildly false. In fact it coincides with the large scale onset of these activities. This strong correlation is strong evidence of causation, especially since no other possible cause has appeared.
To begin with, offshore lease sales really geared up 2015-16, with nine big sales off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. These sales must have generated a lot of activity, likely including potentially damaging sonar.
In fact 2016 also saw the beginning of what are called geotechnical and site characterization surveys. These surveys are actually licensed by NOAA Fisheries, under what are called Incidental Harassment Authorizations or IHA’s.
There is some seriously misleading jargon here. IHA’s are incidental to some other activity, in this case offshore wind development. They are not incidental to the whales. In fact the term “harassment” specifically includes injuring the whales. That is called “level A harassment”.
To date NOAA has issued an astounding 46 one-year IHA’s for offshore wind sites. Site characterization typically includes the protracted use of what I call “machine gun sonar”. This shipboard device emits an incredibly loud noise several times a second, often for hours at a time, as the ship slowly maps the sea floor.
Mapping often takes many days to complete. A blaster can log hundreds of miles surveying a 10-by-10 mile site. Each IHA is typically for an entire year.
Here is a list of the IHA’s issued to date and those applied for.
There are lots of ways this sonar blasting might cause whales to die. Simply fleeing the incredible noise could cause ship strikes or fish gear entanglements, the two leading causes of whale deaths. Of the whales could be deafened, increasing their chances of being struck by a ship later on. Direct bleeding injury, like getting their ears damaged, is another known risk, possibly leading to death from infection. So there can be a big time difference between blasting and death.
Note also that these deaths need not be in the immediate vicinity of the sonar blasting, so spatial correlation is unlikely. Humpbacks in particular are prodigious travelers. One group was tracked traveling 3,000 miles in just 28 days, over 100 miles a day on average. Another group routinely migrates 5,000 miles. Both are winter-summer migrations which can happen twice a year.
Thus a sonar blasting, site characterization in one place could easily lead to multiple whale deaths hundreds of miles away. If one of these blasters suddenly goes off near a group of whales they might go off in different directions, then slowly die.
The point is that the huge 2016 jump in annual humpback mortality coincides with the huge jump in NOAA Incidental Harassment Authorizations. It is that simple and surely NOAA Fisheries knows this.
Nor is this just about humpbacks. Some of the dead whales off New Jersey are endangered sperm whales. And of course there are the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, on the verge of extinction.
Even worse, the IHA’s are about to make a much bigger jump. There are eleven pending IHA applications and eight of these are for actually constructing 8 different monster wind “farms”.
Driving the hundreds of enormous monopiles that hold up the turbine towers and blades will be far louder than the sonic blasters approved to date, especially with eight sites going at once. These construction sites range from Virginia to Massachusetts, with a concentration off New Jersey and New York.
https://heartland.org/opinion/evidence-says-offshore-wind-development-is-killing-lots-of-whales/
***************************************************Energy chaos: the shape of things to come
Australian governments have made energy policies focused on achieving higher shares of renewable energy that they claim is the cheapest source of power. The Commonwealth government is planning for renewables to reach 82 per cent of supply by 2030, while the Liberal Party’s plan is for 85 per cent by 2050 and 61 per cent by 2030. State governments have additional plans. In pursuit of these goals, governments around Australia are being sucked into a vortex requiring ever-increasing controls, while seeing mounting cost increases.
Subsidies that amount to $6.9 billion per year have propelled wind and solar, which had virtually no market presence 20 years ago, to their current market share of 27 per cent. The CSIRO and other bodies claim that these are the cheapest forms of electricity, but the absurdity of this is demonstrable – the market shares of wind and solar would be negligible without these subsidies. And the subsidies themselves amount to over one-third of what electricity generation would cost if renewable requirements did not push up prices.
A recent study from the UK identifies a similar magnitude of costs to support renewables (which now provide 36 per cent of the nation’s electricity). The hidden subsidies to renewables amounted to 13 billion pounds ($24 billion) in 2021, a little over three times Australia’s $6.9 billion cost for a population two and a half times greater. Among major countries only Germany, which has gone even further down the renewables path, has higher energy prices
As in Australia, the UK’s growth in subsidised renewables has brought an accelerating increase in prices. That process in both countries predated the Ukraine War. This contradicts Mr Albanese’s response, ‘News Flash!!! There has been a war in Europe that has had a global impact!’ to a question from Chris Kenny on why electricity prices had failed to meet the ALP’s projected price fall $275 of per household, but instead had risen by that magnitude.
In fact, European gas and coal prices, though still much higher than a year ago, have fallen (in the case of gas to a quarter of their June-October 2022 levels). That is in spite of a very strong increase in stored reserves. Reasons for this included customer demand response and supply response of non-Russian sources (and Russian sea-borne sources), to high prices, a mild winter and shift from gas to electricity (including coal-generated electricity).
Australia’s ballooning energy costs are entirely self-inflicted. They are caused by years of bowing to green ideology by:
* increasing taxes on coal and gas;
* discrimination against coal and gas by requiring increasing quantities be incorporated in consumers’ supplies, this month amplified by obligating an additional 30 per cent cut in emissions from the 215 firms that account for some 28 per cent of electricity demand;
* governmental legislative and policy impediments on new mines for coal and gas (as well as the embargo in nuclear) and by government appointed judges’ rulings on new mine proposals;
* government electricity purchasing that excludes supplies generated by coal or gas.
Australia, like many other countries, is dreaming up new restraints on the use of hydrocarbons. Among these are bans proposed (and already legislated in South Australia) on gas ovens. The rationale for these bans is that, though gas has lower CO2 emissions than coal, an electricity supply comprising solar/wind generation is claimed to have no emissions.
Governments, panicked by the failure of their interventionist energy policies to bring about the low costs they and their advisers confidently projected, have now introduced price caps on coal and gas. With no sense of irony, the objective is to maintain hydrocarbon generators that are being driven out of business by governments’ discriminatory energy policies.
The measures exemplify a Hayekian ‘road-to-serfdom’ process, whereby interventions require consequential additional measures. Having seen policies preventing hydrocarbon developments bring shortages and ballooning prices, the Commonwealth implemented price caps. Predictably, the price caps cause supply shortages from an industry that has been prevented from developing new supplies by government embargoes that have been in place for over a decade. So, governments move on to further control involving specifying levels of production that they think are attainable.
Unsurprisingly, governments working with ‘high-level’ policy advisers are even botching price cap and associated domestic reserve process.
Companies are unable to interpret the Commonwealth regulations delegated to the ACCC.
New South Wales, working with the Albanese government, is seeking to reserve 22 million tonnes of coal for local consumption. This ex post facto imposition of reserve tonnage requirements will have damaging effects on the reputation of Australia for political certainty and by causing investors to place a premium on future costs, will lower future income levels.
Moreover, much of the planned coal to be reserved for domestic use is of a more valuable quality than that used in domestic power stations. Redirecting it to domestic uses would be wasteful in itself. This would be compounded since burning this higher quality coal in domestic power stations would likely cause damage unless other costs were incurred.
In addition, planning 22 million tonnes of coal to be redirected from exports is evidence of incompetence since even with the Liddell power station open (it is supposed to close in April) only 15 million tonnes were used last year. And if Liddell’s output is replaced by that of the remaining four power stations (Bayswater, Vales Point, Eraring, and Mount Piper) their greater efficiency would mean even less coal required.
Imprisoned by the green policies they have set in train, instead of abandoning the embargoes and taxes favouring their preferred renewable sources, governments are doubling down on the restrictions. Yet, each new layer of interventions proves to be inadequate and the mirage of low-cost reliable wind/solar electricity constantly recedes to the horizon.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/energy-chaos-the-shape-of-things-to-come/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment