Our liberal counterparts over at the Progressive Pulse seem delighted about NC House BIll 77 (pdf), which would require 20 percent of the state’s electricity to come from "renewable" sources, such as ethanol, solar and wind power. (Progressive Pulse fails to mention the, eh hem, nuclear option, which is also renewable.)
Putting aside the unsettled science of global warming for a moment: what, indeed, is "progressive" about further support for the distortive ethanol subsidies that are positively ruinous to the environment in ways not connected with global warming? What about the landscape-killing aspects associated with wind power? And what about all the costly subsidies, in general, that will be required to prop up these cost-ineffective means of energy production (either requiring new taxes, helping drive up staple food-stuffs of the poor, or driving up energy prices, particularly for those who cant afford it)? Climate change has become such an intense obsession for progressives that they are willing essentially to cannibalize other aspects of the environmental movement for this one issue. Before leaping upon this bandwagon, we’d like to see the folks at NC Policy Watch offer something more nuanced than blind allegiance to the General Assembly’s mini-Al Gores.
(*Update: add to the ethanol mandate distortions, the price of meat going up. And here.)
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