player pianos...,
2011-03-07 15:17:37
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the barry does not fall far from the shrub...,
2011-03-08 01:25:24
in which accurately describing his energy policy is in no way an endorsement:
A cross-comment to Peter Treadway's "hard truths about energy", plus links and a minor correction on renewable tax credits that are now tax grants:
"The Obama Adminstration’s policy seems to be one of discouraging domestic production of [fossil energy] and offering massive subsidies to less efficient [non-fossil energy]"
This is just a flat out factually inaccurate boondoggle of a description of the proposed policy changes, both of existing policy and the proposed policy. He's proposed cutting $3.6 billion in massive production subsidies for oil and coal, $2.5 billion in home heating subsidies for natural gas, $6 billion in ethanol subsidies (which were quietly dropped from his budget proposal altogether), and slashing research funding for fuel cell, alternative fossil fuel (like shale "oil"), and hydrogen research. Some of that massive pile of subsidies would be shifted over to expanding natural gas electricity production in lieu of coal, expanding coal industry carbon sequesterization research subsidies, and tripling loan guarantees for nuclear power from $18B to $54B. None of the production subsidies will be shifted to renewables: the budget proposal just extends the already existing 30% tax grants for "qualifying" renewable energy investments.
"As far as I can tell, ideology – not economics or physics – is driving this policy."
Here I absolutely agree, the ideology driving this policy is your own, that of a "free market economist". You should be celebrating a $10.9 billion reduction in market distorting subsidies being replaced with a $2.2 billion increase in energy research (through the DOE's EERE R&D program), which only disrupts markets when the product, if there is any, of the research is privatized at some unpredictable point in the future.
For that matter if you were an actual economist you might have acknowledged at some point the environmental externalities of fossil and nuclear energy, instead of only focusing on the "massive birdkiller" wind industry.
If you care about birds so much euthanize your cat. Cats kill hundreds of millions of birds every year, orders of magnitude more than the wind industry. And fossil fuels have environmental impacts that also kill birds, and an economist would talk about relative costs, e.g. "wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V2W-4VVW4W3-3/2/c227be169c9bc8fa4765ebb57cb911a1).
So you don't know what you're talking about here, and then you tell us why: "I would cite Robert Bryce, Peter Huber, George Gilder and Vaclav Smil"
While Huber and Smil at least have some publishing credentials at conservative think tanks, favorably citing the co-founder of the post-modern creationist movement explains a lot that needs explaining. George Gilder? You're hanging your hat on that anti-science quack while complaining that Obama's relatively free-market policies aren't based on physics? That's just stupefying.
