If you go to to Friday’s New York Times and AZ Star, you’ll find these three energy-related articles:
Sensing Gains Ahead Under Trump, the Kochs Court Minorities. The Koch Brothers have begun a well-funded, new nonprofit business association, Fueling U.S. Forward, which is spreading the fossil fuels gospel to minority communities — almost literally, by funding gospel concerts where Hosannas are sung in praise of God, Coal, Oil and Natural Gas.
Arizona Corporation Commission urged to fix solar net metering ‘grandfathering’ issue. The ACC slashed the compensation rooftop solar owners will receive for excess energy generation that makes its way onto the grid. The ACC is being asked to improve one small part of a very bad decision by amending the grandfathering rules so people who submit their energy interconnection applications before the deadline will receive the current net metering compensation, as well as people who have their interconnections completed by the deadline. [Note: On Tuesday the ACC amended the rules to include those who submit applications before the deadline.]
China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020. China is funding a huge push to add renewables to its energy grid, both to lower its ridiculously high pollution levels and to try and dominate the world’s growing renewable energy markets.
To sum up: U.S. cities have less pollution than they had decades ago and far less pollution than China’s smog-choked cities, but courtesy of the expected pro-fossil-fuels, anti-regulation push from the Trump administration, we may slide backwards while China pushes forward. The Brave New Trump Era could harm our environment and our health while it slows our technological advances in the renewable energy arena and loses us potential business worldwide.
The headline for a fourth story from a few days ago reads, Arizona still a force in solar power, despite other states’ gains. It’s about our growing solar energy sector, which is second in the nation to California. Apparently, we’re OK with private businesses setting up vast solar power arrays so they can make lots of money off our abundant sunshine, but we’re not so OK with encouraging individual homeowners to fill unused space on their rooftops with solar panels by giving them fair compensation for the energy they produce. Corporate and home solar both reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but home solar can also reduce corporate profits, and that’s just not the Arizona way.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2017.
From their website:
Who We Are
Fueling U.S. Forward is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about the value and potential of American energy, the vast majority of which comes from fossil fuels. Energy shapes everything we do, every moment of our life so much so that we often take it for granted. No longer. The story of energy is one worth telling, and one best told by the people who have the most at stake.
Fee speech, and education from the actual professionals in the business world. Who could argue with that?
David Safier.
Millions of birds, including bald eagles are killed every year by wind turbines.
A small price to pay for liberals to feel good.
http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-10-20-times-more-than-previously-thought.html
Dying a little more inside with each ugly comment that’s posted.
This from FactCheck.org
In promoting his energy plan, Donald Trump made two false claims:
Trump said wind farms in the U.S. kill more than 1 million birds a year. Reliable data are scarce, but current mean estimates range from 20,000 to 573,000 bird deaths per year.
While discussing the number of eagles that are killed by wind turbines, Trump said that if you shoot an eagle they want to put you in jail for five years. Actually, the maximum penalty is a one-year imprisonment.
Energy IS a problem in this country. How many marine life birds have been killed by oil slicks? How many fish? What about the air pollution that affects humans, adults and kids with asthma? Next let’s talk about black lung disease and the profits unregulated coal corporations make. The fact us that energy use in this country is complex, and politicians love to tweak the facts (lie) to achieve their agendas.
No amount of fossil-fuel industry propaganda can change the fact that global climate disruption is the greatest threat to both people and wildlife in the 21st century. That’s no longer just a prediction–it’s already happening.
And the whole point of the net metering saga is that rooftop solar is truly revolutionary, in the sense that it could render fossil fuels (and yes, problematic wind turbines, too) obsolete–but also in the sense that it threatens to break corporate control over centralized, monopolized systems of energy production and distribution, which is why the big utilities and fossil fuel companies are doing everything they can to retard the growth of rooftop solar, which includes launching a great big torpedo at fair-market-value net metering. Our incredibly corrupt Corporation Commission is merely marching in lockstep with their corporate benefactors on that one.