We need a plan!
It would help if this plan was grounded in reality. From
FOX News:
Billions spent in Obama climate plan may be virtually useless, study suggests
As President Obama last month launched a sweeping new national program to combat "climate change," including tens of billions of dollars in likely new subsidies for solar and wind power and bio-energy, a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.
The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project's research horizon.
Some more:
After a survey of expert literature on the tax and subsidy topic, coupled with extensive customized computer modeling work, the study declared that "their combined impact is less than 1 percent of total U.S. emissions" over the next 25 years, and they are a lousy bargain to boot: "Very little if any GHG reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions."
So much so, in fact, that the study concluded "current tax expenditures and subsidies are a poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives." They "achieve small reductions in GHG emissions and are costly per unit of emissions reduction."
The full cost was something the study was unable to make entirely clear. It estimated that the federal government had spent some $48 billion in just the past two years on "tax expenditures"-meaning subsidies, credits, and other incentives -- related to the energy sector, and also noted that few were specifically enacted to reduce greenhouse gases.
Amazing how a bureaucracy can be so impotent and their only answer is to grow the bureaucracy even larger.
Posted by DaveH at July 18, 2013 5:04 PM