by Richard Caperton and Stephen Lacey

The Wall Street Journal released another error-riddled editorial against the wind industry today calling for an end to the production tax credit. The piece is so bad — and features such a broad range of spin and inaccuracies — it deserves a special, point-by-point debunk.

The WSJ starts off by incorrectly describing how renewable energy tax credits work, almost immediately destroying editorial credibility:

Congress finally ended decades of tax credits for ethanol in December, a small triumph for taxpayers. Now comes another test as the wind-power industry lobbies for a $7 billion renewal of its production tax credit.

The renewable energy tax credit—mostly for wind and solar power—started in 1992 as a “temporary” benefit for an infant industry.

Firstly, the production tax credit is not used for solar power — and it never has. Solar and wind power have different characteristics and thus require different tax treatments. This may seem like a small point, but if WSJ editors are going to rail against these tax credits, they should be able to understand what they’re talking about.

Nope. There are more factual errors on these tax credits:

The “1603 grant program” pays up to 30% of the construction costs for renewable energy plants (a subsidy that ended last year but which President Obama calls for reviving in his budget). Billions in Department of Energy grants and loan guarantees also finance the operating costs of these facilities. Wind producers then get the 2.2% tax credit for every kilowatt of electricity generated.

The tax credit is 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, not “2.2% … for every kilowatt.” This deserves a correction.  Seriously, the WSJ shouldn’t have people writing about these issues who can’t tell cents from percent and kilowatt-hour from kilowatt. This is a joke.

And let’s remember that one justification for the tax credit is to makeup for the fact that taxpayers are bearing the harm from fossil fuels — see Economics Stunner: “Oil and Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added.” Taxpayers are effectively subsidizing polluting forms of energy through the healthcare system!

The 1603 program is also misrepresented here.  The WSJ makes it seem like companies were taking advantage of both the grant program and production tax credits at the same time. In fact, the grant was created to take the place of a tax credit during the height of the economic crisis when the tax financing market imploded.

The characterization of Senator Bingaman’s clean energy standard is also ludicrous:

Twenty years later, the industry wants another four years on the dole, and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has introduced a national renewable-energy mandate so consumers will be required to buy wind and solar power no matter how high the cost.

By claiming that a national target will force utilities to buy renewable power “no matter how high the cost” is factually wrong.  The CES has an price ceiling of 3 cents per kwh for clean energy credits. The WSJ is intentionally misleading its readers about the facts of this bill. The editorial board should be embarrassed.

But they clearly aren’t:

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In a scathing letter to the editor, thirty-eight of the world’s top climatologists have rebuked Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its publication of a “scientist” op-ed denying the threat of manmade global warming. The letter, authored by climate scientist Kevin Trenberth and colleagues from the world’s top science institutions, tells the Wall Street Journal editors to “Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate“:

You published “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

The 16 climate deniers include a medical doctor, some engineers, and astrophysicists. One of the climate deniers who wrote the “No Need to Panic” op-ed, Richard Lindzen, questions whether smoking causes cancer, and another of the climate deniers, Claude Allegre, doesn’t believe asbestos is hazardous.

The climate scientists demolish the canard that global warming “stopped”:

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

The Wall Street Journal published the denier op-ed after rejecting a letter on the threat of manmade climate change from fossil fuel pollution by 255 members of the National Academies of Science.

Read the letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, in full:
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In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, sixteen prominent global warming deniers with scientific backgrounds — such as tobacco apologist Richard Lindzen of MIT and ExxonMobil executive Roger Cohen — concede that manmade carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet, but argue that the effect is “small” and nothing to “panic” about. All the other scientists in the world who believe the science are part of a conspiracy to intimidate people like themselves, they write, just as Soviet biologists who believed in genes were “sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.”

As climate scientist Peter Gleick reports at his Forbes.com blog, those other scientists include 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences who wrote a letter about the scientific threat of climate change for the Wall Street Journal — but were turned down:

The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal with respect to manmade climate change is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a scientifically accurate essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because 16 so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

The NAS letter was eventually published by Science magazine.

Even though the first decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, and 2005 and 2010 were the warmest years on record, the denier op-ed asserts “the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”

This op-ed was promoted on Fox News, Real Clear Politics, Alex Jones’ Infowars, and other right-wing political and conspiracy sites.

By Daniel J. Weiss

There are reports that on December 19^th the Environmental Protection Agency will promulgate the long awaited standards to require coal fired power plants to reduce their mercury, arsenic, lead, and other toxic pollution.  The dirtiest utilities and big coal companies have launched an eleventh hour pressure campaign to convince President Obama to delay or weaken the implementation of these safeguards that would prevent 1,400 premature deaths per month.

One of the major false claims about these vital health protections is that they would make our electricity system less reliable.   On December 10^th, two major utilities rebutted these claims in letters published in the Wall St. Journal in response to its misleading editorial.   Ralph Izzo, Chairman, CEO, and President of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) responded

“As CEO of an energy company with nuclear, coal and natural gas-fueled power plants, I found the alarms raised in your editorial about a ‘looming threat to electric reliability’ to be exaggerated. You won’t get an argument from me about the importance of reliability. However, the report you cite concludes that the EPA’s proposed clean-air rules will have a modest impact on plant retirements.

“No one disputes that mercury is harmful to human health or that the technology is available now to reduce mercury emissions dramatically. Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. invested $1.5 billion in our coal-fired power plants, reducing emissions of mercury and acid gases by 90% or more. Those projects created jobs for 1,600 construction workers and added permanent positions at our plants. We are not alone. Nearly 60% of the U.S. coal fleet has mercury-control equipment installed or under construction. The EPA’s air rules will provide the certainty to move forward with large, job-creating investments to modernize America’s electric power infrastructure.”

Jack Fusco, CEO and President of Calpine Corp., with 92 power plants in 20 states, also rebutted the WSJ’s claims.

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