Trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies haven't made wind and solar cheaper for Americans.
New York Post (4/9/24) op-ed: "Despite us constantly being told that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity, governments around the world needed to spend $1.8 trillion on the green transition last year. 'Wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil' is how President Biden conveniently justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on green subsidies. Indeed, arguing that wind and solar are the cheapest is a meme employed by green lobbyists, activists and politicians around the world. Wind and solar energy only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The rest of the time, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed. This is why global electricity remains almost two-thirds reliant on fossil fuels — and why we, on current trends, are an entire century away from eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation. It is often reported that large, emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal. Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times as much, while Bangladesh got 13 times more coal electricity than it did from green energy sources, and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more. If solar and wind really were cheaper, why would these countries miss out? Because reliability matters."
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"Advocates of a high SCC should likewise be wary of relying on federal estimates. Under a potential second term for President Trump, the interagency task force could be disbanded, and the EPA’s estimate of the SCC could be changed again to rely on a 7 percent discount rate applied to the FUND model of climate costs and benefits, yielding a negative SCC. A negative SCC means fossil‐fuel projects would be given favorable regulatory treatment relative to non‐fossil projects. Perhaps that is why petitioners urged the PSC to require the use of a 2 percent discount rate."
– Travis Fisher, Cato Institute
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