Daily Archives: 30 August 2012

Renewable Energy

Posted on by
Reply

Has German Chancellor Angela Merkel figured out something Barack Obama hasn’t?  As recently as last June, her government had set a goal that by 2020, renewable energy (vis., wind and solar) would comprise 35% of Germany’s electricity production.  In the first half of 2012 (ending that June), Germany already was generating 25% of its electricity from wind and solar, among other renewables.

Then some other things became apparent.  Germany’s Renewable Power Act requires power companies to buy wind- and solar-originated electricity in significant quantities.  Their largest industrial electricity users consume 18% of the electricity produced,  However, they pay only 0.3% of the extra costs generated by those required buys—German taxpayers pay the difference.

The power grid hasn’t kept up with the growth in alternative energy sources—like the offshore windparks in the Baltic and North Seas off the country’s north coast.  Many of those projects are at a standstill, with no way to deliver the power they generate to the mainland.

That Renewable Energy Act provides incentives to build wind turbines, but it doesn’t provide incentives to build the natural gas-fired power plants the country needs for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing (see the figure).

Withal, German consumers are faced with skyrocketing electricity bills.

Now Merkel is changing her mind.  She; her Environment Minister, Peter Altmaier; and her Economy Minister, Philipp Rösler are meeting with industry and union representatives “to discuss the rising costs for consumers.  In the run up to that meeting, Altmaier has indicated that he hopes to…put the brakes on the current rush toward renewables.”

In the US, we have these: green energy subsidies (guaranteed loans, tax credits) and a Federal requirement that power companies buy power from renewable energy producers.

Off the New England coast, special interests found the views from their beach front manses would be offended by wind farms, and the potential farms themselves were declared a “hazard” to aircraft, so they are not even being built.  In central California, environmentalists won’t allow some solar farms to be built and won’t allow the power cables that would deliver solar electricity to cities to be built.

The EPA still requires ethanol to be blended into our gasoline, even though not enough of that is being produced to meet EPA requirements, much that is produced is exported, and the whole charade is driving up the cost of food.

Maybe we should, in  this case, try Obama’s meme of being more like Europe, or at least more like Germany.

Four More Years of This?

Posted on by
Reply

Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, had some…interesting…things to say recently.

Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around.  And over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery.

Hmm….

The Investor’s Business Daily editorialist had a few things to say about her claim.

She starts counting private-sector job growth under Obama in February 2010 and, sure enough, in the 29 months since then (not 27 as Cutter says), there have been 4.5 million private-sector jobs created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

February 2010 was fully eight months into the economic recovery.  So Cutter has simply picked the worst month under Obama as her starting point….  In the aftermath of the 1981-82 recession, private-sector jobs bottomed out in December 1982, the month after that recession ended.  Twenty-nine months later, the private sector under Reagan had created 8 million jobs—nearly twice as many as under Obama.  How about Bush?  …if you use the Cutter method, the private sector created 4.7 million jobs in the 29 months after July 2003, when the job market bottomed.  In other words, Bush beat Obama by his own preferred measuring technique by 200,000 jobs.

What’s more, after 29 months of allegedly stellar job growth under Obama, the jobless rate is still 8.3%.  By this point in the Reagan and Bush jobs recoveries, the unemployment rate was 7.2% and 4.9%, respectively.

It’s important to note, too, that Obama continues to offer not least minim of evidence that these created jobs have resulted from his policies in particular, and not from the normal economic business recovery that follows any recession—only now with the recovery rate suppressed by his policies.

And there’s this tidbit that bears on Cutter’s claim.

In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983.  By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. … That’s $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month’s income every year.

[E]ven if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal.  Three years after the economy hit its trough, median household income is down $2,544, or nearly 5%.

Some jobs he’s “created.”

Now, isn’t Cutter the one who spoke Obama’s lie about his Republican opponent being a felon?  Isn’t she the one who carried Obama’s denial of all knowledge of his SuperPAC’s ad accusing his opponent of killing a woman with his practices at Bain?  Why, yes.  Yes, she is.  Can anyone take seriously anything her mouth talks about?

A larger question: can we afford four more years of an administration so plainly out of contact with the reality of our current economic strait?

 

h/t Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club