In scalding opening remarks during a House hearing Friday, ranking member Ed Markey (D-MA) blamed Republicans for dragging their feet on developing clean energy and providing unconditional support for fossil energies and nuclear.
“Renewable energy has been an invisible issue” for the Republican party over the last decade, he said during the Natural Resources Committee hearing on siting renewable energy projects on public lands
His remarks come after the House passed three different Republican-sponsored bills to increase domestic offshore drilling – the latest requiring the Obama Administration to speed up permitting of leases. The bill was part of a Republican strategy to increase domestic offshore oil production by more than 75% over the next 25 years.
Why is Markey so mad? Well, according to him, this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. During the Bush Administration, over 40,000 permits where handed out to oil and gas facilities on public lands, he said. And during that time only 3 applications were given for wind and zero were given for solar. In 2010 alone, 3,800 MW of projects were approved on public lands – 13 times the number of projects completed during the 8-years President Bush was in office.
Republicans are consumed by an “oil-above-all approach” to energy policy, said Markey.
The remarks were made during a hearing about streamlining permitting for onshore and offshore renewable energy projects on federal lands. A pretty innocuous topic, until you consider the current political context.
As part of a budget proposal, Republicans are currently proposing to phase out the loan guarantee program for renewable energy, which has backed over $18 billion and helped developers raise over $28 billion for projects. In addition, other important incentives like the Treasury Grant Program and federal tax incentives are set to expire with no clear plan from Congress on how or when to extend them.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to aggressively push for offshore drilling and support indefinite tax credits for the 5 largest oil companies. Not exactly a forward-looking policy agenda.
As Markey explained: “You don’t need a blowout preventer on a solar field.”
– Stephen Lacey
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Informative stuff, thanks. The Republicans obviously work for the oil companies, not us.
Tell us more about the possible expiration of renewable energy loan guarantees and tax incentives. That could really damage the wind and solar industries. Do you expect the Republicans and their Blue Dog friends to prevail here? They are, after all, in a majority.
Hi Mike –
I plan on doing a comprehensive story on the Loan Guarantee and Treasury Grant Programs ending, and what that might do to the industry. Be on the lookout for that soon. (And it’s always hard to say, but I think people are bracing for quite a few major changes.) — Stephen
Do the oil companies even want all these new leases? I keep reading that they are already sitting on piles of leases they aren’t working.
So far the world record profits have come during supply shortfalls. If you think like a corporate bean counter you gotta be more interested in minimizing risk while maximizing return (aka $100/barrel oil)…than in maximizing supply (aka $60/barrel oil).
Perhaps the Grand Oil Party isn’t looking so much to increase oil production as to prevent alternatives emerging. It fits the profit model for Big Oil better to kill alternatives even more than it does to maximize new oil supplies.
As Stephen and Joe have pointed out many times the cost learning curves for renewables like wind and solar are much better than for oil, coal and nuclear. The tipping point is visible on the horizon.
Slowing the build out of renewables will slow the price drop that comes with build out. It also slows down an alternative supply to ever more expensive oil. The more years of $100+/barrel the oil companies can pull off the more world-record profits they can make while producing less oil each year.
My guess is GOP is more anti-expansion of renewables than it is pro-expansion of oil production.
Demanding that Big Solar (PB, Chevron, Golden Sachs, etc.) be given the same license as oil and gas to destroy public assets for energy development is equally short sited. How about a brave new business model for green energy that avoids destroying the environment and endangered species? The EPA’s RE-Power America presents a plan to site utility scale solar on already developed lands, combined with expediting large-scale on-site distributed generation in the built environment will get us farther, faster and much more cost effectively without sacrificing public lands: http://solardoneright.org/index.php/news/post/new_report_blasts_administrations_public_lands_solar_policy/
I think reps have large investments in fossil energy. They can’t get pass this. Greed, maybe panic….as I think many of them realize the reality of GW secretly.
The oil&gas industry is in the best period of production growth in the USA starting in 2007 since arguably the start-up of the north slope oil production in Alaska in 1977. This upward trend in oil production in the USA is likely to continue for another 2-4 years. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the o&g industry is being held back in any material way by any regulation or policy in the USA. There are definitely bottlenecks in their growth plans in production in the USA, but these are due to limits in available expert personnel and specialized rigs and equipment. There is absolutely no shortage of exploration licenses. There is some resistance to drilling for shale gas in some selected regions, but growth in shale gas production in other more amenable regions is more than enough to supply the natural gas market and stabilize prices at historically low levels. The contention by the GOP that Obama is holding back industry is a bold-faced lie of the most political kind.
Todd #6, ‘bare-faced lying’, as you aptly describe it, once a scandal, is, these days, the ‘Gold Standard’ of political life. There is nowadays, a vicious coalition between the Rightwing political establishment, and its MSM, to lie through their teeth, about everything, including the ecological crisis, and suppress the truth by denying it the ‘oxygen of publicity’. I’ve been banned from watching the TV news because I scream too much at the lies-it alarms the cats. The crisis came when the ABC, our ‘national broadcaster’, which over the last decade has been taken over ideologically by the Murdoch apparat, broadcast video of a massive pro-Government rally in Damascus in Syria, as an ‘anti-regime demonstration’. Even though I complained to the ABC, there has never been a retraction or apology. Every day lies, bare-faced, audacious, impertinent lies, fly back and forth. Then there is cynical hypocrisy, and the deliberate giving of false impressions. ‘Democracy’ by any definition but rule of the rich for the rich, died years ago, but the robopaths are now performing a sort of St Vitus’ dance on the grave. The basis of my deep pessimism concerning humanity’s future is the nature of those in power globally, courtesy of late capitalism’s unbeatable skill at identifying the very worst human types, then promoting and empowering them. I look at the political, media and business elite in this country, the overlords, and I can honestly not nominate one who I would describe as a truly admirable human being, in my terms, but scores I suspect are morally insane, often of an hereditary nature. My greatest fear is that when the crisis really breaks, that when humanity faces its moment of truth, there will not be any leaders of intelligence, moral strength and courage left, and we will instead get a gangster type they know from the streets of Liberia and Somalia.
Mulga#7, at times your cynicism can be quite contagious.
You must have occasional flashes of optimism, don’t you?
What, in your wildest dreams, is our way out if this pit?
Warm regards,
Roger
Roger, I, naturally, think that I am a realist, not a cynic. I have very high ideals, which seems to me a moral duty as a living human being, and once had idealistic hopes for humanity. Not any more. It’s not, in my opinion, the average person at fault, but the pathocratic global ruling elite, who have perfected, over centuries, those techniques of mass manipulation, primarily ‘divide and rule’ policies where they set humanity at each others’ throats, that are almost impossible to defeat. Our last hope, I believe, is that some sequence of disasters will awaken humanity to the nature of the global elite, before it is too late, and they will be replaced by better types. But I know that such a transformation will be resisted with utmost violence, a dreadful prospect, but, as I said, my only hope. Wishing for moral growth amongst the elite is hopeless,
I have similar beliefs, to Mulga, I think. Climate change denialism, supported by corporate astroturf, could not exist without elite consent. Conversely, attempting to reform our current energy supply system will be much, much more difficult without elite consent.
When our financial elites want to do something, like invade the Middle East, our media is full of justifications to do it. When they don’t want to do something, then, it’s portrayed as difficult to impossible to accomplish.
One way or another, we have to either overthrow such elites, preferably by peaceful means, or gain their cooperation, if we want rapid progress on AGW remediation.
Obama’s emergency power is essentially unlimited- or so the Bush era legal scholars used to say. He should just seize the coal fired power plants, and forcibly convert them to BECCS, IMO.
Our financial elites won’t pay any attention to anything except nationalization, IMO. Certainly, so long as ExxonMobil and the other member corporations of big oil remain in power, with all their money and influence, progress on AGW remediation will be very slow.
Seize them, I think. Forcibly transform them. Any less drastic course of action will be diffused, distracted, and ignored, by a financial elite that is either in denial or actively malignant.
Leland #10, if Obama seized coal-fired power-stations, the legal authorities that gave Bush unlimited powers to kidnap, torture and invade, would change their opinions. Congress would turn on him, perhaps refusing to increase the debt ceiling. The MSM would declare him a new Castro, or worse, and ‘startling new evidence’ of his birth on the planet Zog would emerge. You know the scenarios. Obama is an employee of various factions of the US ruling class-the financial industry, his most generous financial contributors and the Zionist Lobby who recruited and promoted him, to the fore, and he is not about to double-cross them. He knows his place.