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The Green Initiative and its distractors
#1
So predictable, and so lame..

Quote:House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) disagrees with the overwhelming majorities of both parties who support increased investment in clean energy. On the same day Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a Green New Deal resolution to address the climate crisis and create millions of high wage jobs, McCarthy took to Twitter to say, “‘The green dream’ is actually a nightmare.”

“Green dream” is a term House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) used to refer to the Green New Deal in a Politico interview Wednesday. McCarthy’s tweet includes videos of Pelosi and President Barack Obama explaining that investing in clean energy is critical for a variety of reasons, including maintaining U.S. technological preeminence, national security, and boosting the economy. These are the same reasons that increased federal support for clean energy has such broad support across the political spectrum. McCarthy’s video then proceeds to rehash the misguided and misleading GOP attack on the Department of Energy’s loan program, which funded a great many technological winners — like Elon Musk’s Tesla — and a couple of unsuccessful companies, most famously the solar energy company SolyndraWhat’s bizarre about this is that the loan program was wildly successful, earning a $5 billion profit. The many winners paid taxpayers back vastly more money than was lost by the few unsuccessful companies.

‘Scandalous’ Solyndra Program Actually Earned Taxpayers A $5 Billion Profit

McCarthy’s attack also fails to mention that the DOE loan program was actually started by President George W. Bush and his administration pushed the Solyndra loan for two years..
House Republican leader wastes no time in freaking out over Green New Deal – ThinkProgress
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#2
Quote:Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now. That’s the message from studies of the public health “co-benefits” that come with reduced emissions. In many cases, these alone are large enough to provide a compelling case for replacing fossil fuels with clean energy, even without counting benefits for the climate. The burning of fossil fuels releases a toxic stew of air pollutants alongside carbon dioxide, the number one culprit in climate change. Foremost among these “co-pollutants” are sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are hazardous in themselves and undergo chemical reactions in the air to form suspended particulates that penetrate the lungs and further damage human health. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of sulfur dioxide emissions, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated are responsible for about 70% of the health costs from power plants. Air pollution is a leading cause of death at home and abroad. In the U.S., a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that outdoor air pollution kills more than 100,000 Americans each year. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that dirty air kills more than 4 million people annually. Economically, this is a big deal – even bigger than the climate damages often measured by conventional cost-benefit analysis.
Institute for New Economic Thinking
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#3
Quote:Solar net metering, the backbone of the U.S. rooftop solar market for the past two decades, may be facing its most important legal challenge in years — and it's coming at a time when the industry is already reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. A nonprofit group that’s spent years fighting clean-energy legislation in New England is pressing federal regulators to approve a legal argument that could lay the groundwork for challenges to the solar net metering policies now in place in 41 states.

Last week, the New England Ratepayers Association (NERA) filed a petition with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, asking it to declare "exclusive federal jurisdiction over wholesale energy sales from generation sources located on the customer side of the retail meter.” In other words, NERA is asking FERC to assert control over all state net-metering programs, which pay customers for the energy they don't consume on-site but instead feed back to the power grid.
Solar Net Metering Under Threat as Shadowy Group Demands FERC Intervention in State Policies | Greentech Media
  • Dark money trying to derail the solar industry..
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#4
Quote:As the energy crisis in Texas deepened this week, leaving millions without power, heat, and even running water, conservative commentators and politicians persistently peddled a myth that wind turbines are to blame. “It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster,” Tucker Carlson said Monday on Fox News. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also used wind power as a scapegoat for the crisis when he appeared on Fox Tuesday night, but he later walked back his comments.

Let’s get the facts straight. Every type of power plant — whether powered by coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, or wind sources — in Texas was impacted by the ice and freezing temperatures that arrived with Winter Storm Uri over the weekend. But it was natural gas — the state’s top source of electricity — that failed most significantly as wellheads and power plants froze over. Wind turbines, meanwhile, were responsible for 13 percent of the total lost electricity output, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s nonprofit grid operator.

But there is nothing innate about wind power — or natural gas — that caused these power plants to fail. It’s merely a matter of preparation, Hui Hu, a professor of aerospace engineering at Iowa State University who studies wind turbines, told Vox.

Places reliant on wind energy that are no strangers to cold and ice — from Sweden to Iowa — are proof that the freezing of turbines in Texas was not inevitable. The difference: Unlike in Texas, those turbines were weatherized to operate in the cold.
Texas power outage: why wind turbines are not to blame - Vox
  • Wind power is only a fairly small part of Texas electricity generation, can't explain the massive failure
  • Wind functions well in other places with lower temperatures
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