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I have read that not only have the Koch brothers spent 70 million dollars to spread disinformation on climate change, but have also spent a considerable amount of money to get state legislators and state regulators to tax homeowners who use solar and other alternative energy. The Koch brothers and I am sure many other old line energy companies are doing all in their power to frustrate the growth of the alternative energy business not by good old market means but government policy.
Free enterprise and the marketplace for conservatives is apparently good for the other guy. When it comes to their enterprises, any government assistance would be appreciated.
But but but the rich people are the job creators. Green jobs! Have you abandoned your partisan conservative ideology or just temporarily suspended them to take a jab at green energy.
So you support wealth transfer from the working class to the elite? I thought so. Your hipocritical partisan Dem ideology is quite obvious.
Germany’s dash for coal continues apace. Following on the opening of two new coal power stations in 2012, six more are due to open this year, with a combined capacity of 5800MW, enough to provide 7% of Germany’s electricity needs.
Part of the reason, said Diekmann, is the low price of CO2 emissions permits in EU trading scheme. Another reason is that new brown coal plants, with a capacity of 2,743 megawatts, came on line in 2012, far exceeding the 1,321 megawatts from old plants shut down that year
The utilities are fighting back, of course, by using their wealth and the entrenched political power they have built up over the past century. In the United States, brothers Charles and David Koch, who run Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned corporation in the U.S., have secretively donated at least $70 million to a number of opaque political organizations tasked with spreading disinformation about the climate crisis and intimidating political candidates who dare to support renewable energy or the pricing of carbon pollution. A Call to Arms: An invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change
They regularly repeat shopworn complaints about the inadequate, intermittent and inconsistent subsidies that some governments have used in an effort to speed up the deployment of renewables, while ignoring the fact that global subsidies for carbon-based energy are 25 times larger than global subsidies for renewables.
One of the most effective of the groups financed by the Koch brothers and other carbon polluters is the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which grooms conservative state legislators throughout the country to act as their agents in introducing legislation written by utilities and carbon-fuel lobbyists in a desperate effort to slow, if not stop, the transition to renewable energy.
The Kochs claim to act on principles of low taxation and minimal regulation, but in their attempts to choke the development of alternative energy, they have induced the recipients of their generous campaign contributions to contradict these supposedly bedrock values, pushing legislative and regulatory measures in 34 states to discourage solar, or encourage carbon energy, or both. The most controversial of their initiatives is focused on persuading state legislatures and public-utility commissions to tax homeowners who install a PV solar cell on their roofs, and to manipulate the byzantine utility laws and regulations to penalize renewable energy in a variety of novel schemes.
[quote=dv1033;35289363]If you read the article then you'd see how electric utilities just got their utility bonds downgraded by a major investment banking group due to increased competition from solar. What you refuse to acknowledge is already happening.
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