Just before 2am on Saturday morning, Senate Republicans passed their $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a hastily written and hurried bill that will affect Americans all across the country and end up increasing the country’s deficit by $1 trillion, while under the radar the bill will also threaten the country’s renewable energy industry.
With the Senate Republican tax bill racing towards a contentious vote despite numerous obstacles, a group of American energy trade bodies have penned an open letter raising urgent concerns that claim a provision, if it remains as-written, would have dire impacts on the country’s renewable energy industry.
Image: GOP organizer Rush Limbaugh, who stands to make $2.6 million a year from the Republican tax bill. This week, Republican Senator George LeMieux joined Democrats in a letter to Senate leaders asking that the Recovery Act provisions for renewable energy – due to sunset this month – be extended … [continued]
Recovery Act stimulus funding for a technology that will make geothermal power available in every state is being invested in Senator Inhofe’s Oklahoma by the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Program, in a $3 million R&D program to increase the volume of hot rock from which heat can be extracted. … [continued]
In just the first ten days, Wyoming voters used up their share in the funds from The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act designed to end dependence on dirty energy. They voted with their feet against the Senators they sent to vote for dirty energy.
Today, a European company put the finishing touches on a wind project in North Dakota which Americans have known for decades is “the Saudi Arabia of Wind.”
Spain’s Iberdrola Renovables, the parent company of Iberdrola Renewables Inc that built the project became a giant global wind company in the wake of the Kyoto Accord. The European renewable energy sector grew from the resulting renewable energy legislation in Europe.
The result is that it is European wind companies such as Vestas and Iberdrola, that are now building the wind energy that we need.
One of the hardest parts of checking foreign news sources – to find out what others think of the emissions reductions targets their countries are bringing to Copenhagen – is deciphering the meaning of all those political parties’ names. Who knows which side each of these is on, when it comes to climate change.
In a bold move; well timed to coincide with the US Climate Summit decision at Copenhagen, this week the EPA will declare carbon dioxide a “Public Danger” – – triggering the certainty of regulation for big greenhouse gas emitters such as power stations, cement kilns, crude-oil refineries and chemical plants, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The move essentially guarantees that fossil industries feel either the very sharp stick of this EPA ruling…or they allow some of the Senators they control to cross the aisle for the first time on energy legislation and ratify what President Obama has said he is taking to Copenhagen as the US offer: a carbon cut of 17% below 2005 by 2020.
In a move sure to anger the Let’s-do-nothing-about-climate-change-till-China-and-India-do crowd, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India launched a secret Green Partnership to do something about climate change. [social_buttons] The secret arrangement was made while the President was on his failed Asian trip resulting in pre-Copenhagen announcements from … [continued]
