With wind power generation from offshore Louisiana now on the back burner, if not moribund, the hypocrisy of Luddites stumping for propagating this enterprise off the state’s coastline has become all too apparent, even as this result saves American taxpayers and/or consumers their hard-earned dollars.
Under the climate alarmist Democrat former Pres. Joe Biden Administration, a lease for this purpose was sold in federally-controlled waters 40 miles south of Lake Charles. Under the equally climate alarmist Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration, the state also leased two more such lands in state waters.
But now the federal lease has gone with the wind. The Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration, guided by climate realism, gave the German company RWE $1.2 billion dollars to relinquish that claim and offshore sites in other parts of the country.
That it spent only $5.6 million in the auction for 102,000 acres might seem like a fantastic rate of return, except there are strings attached. Three-quarters of the bounty RWE will have to invest in Louisiana LNG, a planned liquified natural gas export terminal near Lake Charles. The remaining quarter it will have to use on natural gas turbines for future use.
Naturally, this deal has incensed climate alarmists. Not only did the move kick out a prop from behind offshore wind generation, it also promises to intensify use of their boogeyman, fossil fuels. Complaints about how this wasted taxpayer money and aided certain private investors were rich in irony and hypocrisy.
In reality, this development saves taxpayer money, because it doesn’t latch onto the bucks behind the federal tax credits that discriminatorily go to investors in wind generation for no good political, social, or scientific reason. Reduced deployment means fewer public dollars wasted. By contrast, there is no federal tax credit subsidy designed specifically for fossil fuel production, although there are more general ones that the fossil fuel industry and others routinely utilize.
Their hypocrisy also rings true in what they don’t mention. For years, Luddites have tried to stymie fossil fuel exploration in the Gulf of America by claiming this despoiled the habitat, most recently invoking whales. Yet wind turbines bring challenges of their own to species, including unavoidable bird strikes, altering migrations, and disturbing currents and marine plant life which apparently are of no concern to these folks.
About the only time they become upset over offshore wind, in fact, is when it’s in their backyard. The Vineyard Wind project, located offshore Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, exemplifies which only recently had a soft startup after decades of controversy where climate alarmist politicians and renewable energy executives protested its placement, for some merely because it spoiled their views.
This trait exposes what we never must forget that many in the climate alarmism movement use that merely as a front for antipathy towards right-sized government, both in terms of the resources it absconds and redistributes and in the power it flexes. By government trying to pick a useful winner, not fossil fuels but siding with a more expensive and less reliable technology dependent on government handouts for survival, it increases the power government has over this important sector of the economy.
Trump Administration efforts to reduce offshore wind generation privileging also have trickled down to the two state projects. One, involving a smaller 6,000-acre parcel near Port Fouchon, apparently has become completely abandoned, while the other, ten times the size near Cameron, appears in abeyance but could progress.
If wind generation projects could stand on their own without any government subsidization, then the offshore kind could make sense as long as it was way out of anybody’s way. But these can’t, and so this sidestep of subsidization is positive as it will save taxpayer dollars (and consumers money if the dollars that would have been spent on that divert to less-expensive fossil fuel production). Louisiana is better off as a result.
No comments:
Post a Comment