At Climate Progress, Richard Caperton writes, CBO: Clean Energy Standards Are an Affordable Way to Cut Carbon Emissions:
It sure would be nice if members of Congress actually listened to the Congressional Budget Office. If they did, they would learn what we’ve known for quite some time: shifting to cleaner electricity generation is an affordable and effective way to reduce carbon emissions.
The CBO just released a summary of seven different types of standards from a variety of sources. The summary uniformly finds that either an RES (renewables alone) or a CES (some combination of renewables, natural gas, nuclear and CCS) will reduce carbon emissions, and that any price impacts to consumers will be minimal. Some consumers may even pay lower utility bills.
Geothermal energy plant
The report does acknowledge that some regions could see price increases. You can bet that some people will jump all over this and claim that clean energy mandates drive up rates. But let’s put the figures into perspective.
Only one out of seven scenarios sees a price increase of more than 5 percent by 2030. At the same time, in five of the seven scenarios, at least one region of the country is projected to see lower electricity prices.
Virtually all price impacts are between plus or minus 5 percent, which is extremely small compared to other expected price impacts. For example, a price increase of 1 percent would be overwhelmed by any change in the price of natural gas generation or in a regulated utility’s allowable rate of return. Electric rates for all consumers will change by 2030, and virtually none of that change would be because of a clean energy standard. ...
Frustratingly, none of the studies CBO includes look at actual policy proposals. Whereas the President has proposed getting 80 percent of the country’s power from a diverse mix of low-carbon sources, the studies in the CBO report are based on meeting much lower targets with much smaller sets of technologies. Inevitably, this means that CBO has underestimated the benefits and overestimated the costs of actual CES proposals.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:
BP announced its second quarter earnings, and news reports are focusing on the oil giant's record loss, as its disastrous oil gusher continues to poison the Gulf of Mexico. Curiously, it takes some digging to find anyone willing to mention that BP's revenues actually soared, last quarter. The Irish Times made such an effort:
BP’s underlying performance, excluding the spill, was strong in the second quarter, with profits of $5 billion and operating cash flow of $8.9 billion, up 31 per cent from the equivalent period of 2009.
BP is doing just fine. It will sell some assets to help cover the short-term loss, and it also has other clever plans. For example, in case you were wondering how it will find the cash to put into its oil gusher escrow fund (assuming BP ever does actually put cash into it), you need not worry. Marketwatch explains that BP will take a $32 billion charge against earnings, due in part to the oil spill—which means it will get a $9.9 billion tax credit.
Top Comments can be found here. High Impact Diaries can be found here.