According to Energy Information Administration data, from 2000 – 2010, the presence of a renewable electricity standard has no statistically significant impact on how much rates changed over that decade.

There’s a thriving cottage industry devoted to debunking Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute.

Last October, Bryce said be believed a still-unproven experiment with neutrinos called our entire scientific understanding of global warming into question.

Earlier in the summer, he had the audacity to quote economist EF Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful” to unleash a factually inaccurate attack on renewables and promote nuclear power. (Ironically, Schumacher called nuclear an “incredible, incomparable, and unique hazard”).

And now, Bryce is claiming that renewable electricity standards (i.e. state targets for renewable generation) have caused state electric rates to increase by 32% from 2001 to 2010, concluding that states should “suspend or eliminate renewable energy mandates to ensure that electricity is affordable.”

This is a continuation of the scary-but-hollow argument that Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist tried to make last December in Politico.

The argument is as presumptuous and inaccurate as it was back then. And still no official agency backs up the claim that renewable energy targets have caused substantial increases in rates.

As Bryce well knows, most of the states with renewable electricity standards had higher rates even before putting targets in place. And because of the extraordinarily complex range of factors that go into pricing electricity — number of customers, average usage, infrastructure investments, etc — blaming these increases on renewable energy targets is misleading at best and an outright lie at worst.

Upon examining electricity rate data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration spanning the decade from 2000-2010, a Center for American Progress analysis found zero statistically-significant difference in how renewable electricity standards affect changes in rates. In states where we do see rate increases, it is difficult to quantify what impact these standards had compared with the myriad other factors that drive changes.

For example, MIT researchers determined that there were 14 reasons why California’s rates varied from the national average. In Hawaii, which had the highest rate increase, it was imports in oil for electricity generation that caused such a dramatic hike. And in Maryland, a state with the next-largest increase, the impact of deregulation has been the primary factor.

In 2008, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory examined the range of states with renewable energy targets and found a roughly 1% impact on rates. And in a progress report on Michigan’s renewable electricity standard issued last month, state regulators found that renewable energy contracts were coming in 30% lower than contracts for coal: “the cost of energy generated by renewable sources continues to decline and is cheaper than a new coal-fired generation,” concluded regulators.

There is no doubt that we will see rate increases in some areas of the country, particularly those that are highly dependent on coal and have done little to implement renewables. These impacts should not be overlooked. But experience in various states shows — most recently in Michigan — renewables are increasingly cost-competitive with coal, a resource that is only getting more expensive.

To claim that renewables have already driven up rates by double digits is simply not true, and is not backed up by any official analysis.

Please post below your tweets of the form ” If serious scientists can question Einstein’s relativity, there must be room for debate about [whether the Earth goes around the sun]. #WSJscience“  I’ll tweet out the best.  Click on cartoon to enlarge.

Writing in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, Koch-fueled disinformer Robert Bryce has published two of the most laughable arguments against climate science ever seen in “Five Truths About Climate Change.”  One of them has quickly become the focus of online laughs and a tweet-fest with the hashtag #WSJscience:

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Yes, a report on one as-yet unreproduced finding in a completely different area of science that might — repeat, might — mean one well-known theory needs modification means we should call into question everything we know about everything.  Stop taking all your medicine now, just to be safe!

Apparently Bryce hasn’t been reading his Conservapedia or he’d know that the theory of relativity is actually a discredited liberal plot:

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold. Here is a list of 37 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.

Back to reality.  As I’ve said many times, the science of climate impacts isn’t “settled” — it’s unsettling.  It just gets more and more dire with each passing year for two reasons.  First, we keep tracking near the worst-case emissions scenarios with no prospect of significant change for the foreseeable future (thank you deniers and your political flunkies).  Second, as reported at the 2010 AAAS meeting, new scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

Bryce easily wins the award for most unintentionally humorous anti-scientific statement since, well, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 2008:  “If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.”

Amazingly, even though they were supposedly “overthrown” — in part by Einstein’s theory of relativity — Newton’s Laws of Motion are still taught in every high school, in every introductory physics class in college, and even in graduate physics classes. Heck, even NASA still uses them!  And if Einstein’s theory of relativity is questioned, modified or even superseded, it will also almost certainly be taught and used for centuries.

Before I discuss how that can be — and debunk once again the uber-debunked Robert Bryce — let’s look at some of the funniest tweets:

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