Republicans Are Determined To Stop Renewable Energy

There has never been any question that the GOP works for Big Oil. Republicans are famous (or infamous) for their fights to eliminate environmental regulations, protect the price-fixing that goes on among the major producers, and provide them federal subsides.

All but a small minority of conservatives and neoconservatives are in lockstep behind every effort by the Republicans to stifle alternative and renewable energy. So, the new “Sun tax” in Oklahoma will thrill right-wingers nationwide.

To discourage the proliferation of renewable energy, the new fee (tax) will be applied to anyone that installs a power generation system on their property and sells excess power back to providers. Those already owning such units will be exempt, for now.

This “protection” to Big Oil by a red state comes as no surprise to people of reason, and is more evidence that the rich and powerful dictate laws in the U.S. Average citizens have no voice.


http://theweek.com/article/index/260115/the-worlds-dumbest-idea-taxing-solar-energy

 

Democrats, also, are determined to stop renewable energy.

 

All but 5 of the Oklahoma democrats voted for the bill.

 

A tax on the production and sale of a product in the private market? How dare you oppose such a tax when, normally, there isn't a tax imposed on private business that a liberal wouldn't fail to advocate if they could. Here in PA for example, the four Democrat candidates for governor are competing with each other to raise taxes on natural gas production:
link

 

No we aren't. In fact we will use your newly discovered "VIABLE" energy source just as soon as you tell us what it is. The messiah has obviously given this information only to lefties. Can you tell us what it is? We will all use it starting tomorrow.
For the record we are against wasting our tax dollars on alternative energies that don't work.
Ill await your newly discovered >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>VIABLE<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< energy source. Lemme guess fusion right? You guys found a way to mass produce trucks to run on fusion.....how cool. Or do you put two wires in a giant potato that would be even cooler!

 

So you want a fee to be paid for cows to graze on federal land because animals grazing somehow hurts only federal land, but don't want taxes paid on people making profit from using the electrical infrastructure? Is that correct?

 

This post is not as good.

Solar energy has plenty of potential. But it's profitability for a corporation is much smaller, and hence only receives attention from entrepreneurial businesses.

 

Can you run a semi tractor trailer truck on a solar panel? If not its not a "viable alternative" its going to forever be a secondary source of energy. If you can I will put a solar panel on my car tomorrow. I hate paying these gas prices and I also hate wasting energy.
If the oil/gas supply stopped today, your family would be murdered by Wednesday for any food or supplies you may have because there currently is no viable alternative energy. There is only secondary energy sources. In order for us to survive and move supplies like "FOOD" to the people we need to use oil. A wind turbine on a truck wont work and neither will a solar panel. At this moment in time, only oil or derivatives of energy made from oil will work.

 

Can you run a semi tractor trailer truck on a solar panel? If not then what you have is only a secondary source of power not a viable alternative. There is no current technology that can replace oil therefore there is no solution. These arguments are only valid if you can replace the gasoline engine with a power source that isn't a derivative of oil. If the trucks stopped running today on oil, your family would be dead by Wednesday murdered by people taking whatever supplies you have. People need food, food is delivered to everyone reading this because of oil. If trucking companies could run their fleet off of solar power they would be already doing it because their profits would increase. They aren't because an alternative viable energy source only exists in the imaginations of liberals. That's why no one has ever been able to answer my question. Because there isn't one yet. Until then perhaps liberals could walk to work if they hate evil oil companies and survive off the food and supplies they only get/grow in their backyards. again viable alternative energy is not the same as secondary energy. Solar and wind will not replace oil until we are smart enough to figure out how to do it. If you have it figured out you will be rich beyond your wildest imagination and history will record you as one the most important humans to ever walk the face of the earth.

 

When it comes to alternative energy, I think the government has to take the lead just like they did with the space program back in the day. Iron out the technologies and get the infrastructure in place because these are the steps that aren't going to be profitable for the private sector. Our energy needs are vastly more important than whether or not they are profitable for a business so if some of energy production, at least in the alternatives market, needs to be nationalized I'm all for that. It galls me to know our country is taking the snail's pace approach to getting off of oil when the technology exists to begin the process. We'll never get off it completely of course, and there are areas where fossil fuels are the only sensible choices right now like with trucking and large industrial vehicles.

 

Now be fair about this. Barack Obama has personally dumped billions of dollars into various green energy companies -- which mysteriously were operated by campaign donors -- which mysteriously then declared bankruptcy and which mysteriously have presented no account of what actually happened to all those billions of dollars and which mysteriously NOBODY in the Obama administration bothered asking about.

Now Obama can only dump so much tax money down so many green energy toilets and then press the flushing lever before succumbing again to physical exhaustion, necessitating another multimillion dollar vacation in Hawaii or perhaps Monte Carlo in order to recover his strength. So these things take time!

 

I think it's extremely fair to bring up the Obama boondoggles when it comes to alternative energy. Nobody was more disappointed in those messes than I was. Well, maybe someone that actually lost money on them might be.

But lets assume there was a Republican administration, or whatever type of administration you'd be okay with in charge. Would the idea have any merit with you then?

 

It's only when this 60 and older generation of right wingers become a politically meaningless voting block that this nation will move forward. They've held us back for about 25 years now on an array of things.

 

I take your point.

But I have to ask, why WOULDN'T Pennylvania tax the extraction of its natural resources? Extraction is a one time deal. Once the oil is out of the ground, you'll never benfit from having the resource ever again.

Pennsylvania appears to be alone among the major oil producing states in giving away its natural resources in this way. It has no severance tax, while virtually every other state where oil and gas production does.

It is both foolish and fiscally irresponsible.

Norway taxed the extraction of North Sea oil and used the money it collected to build a sovereign wealth fund. Today, the fund is one of the largest institutional investors on the planet, with substantial holdings in business and real estate all around the world. These holding generate revenue that helps subsidize Norway's welfare state, and contribute to one of the highest standards of living in the world. Norway makes more interest of the holdings in its sovereign wealth fund than Alaska has made off taxing its oil in its entire 40 years of production.

In a rust bowl state filled with communities that were formerly thriving in the days of big coal, big steel, and railroads, why wouldn't you tax the extraction of your natural resources and use it to build an investment fund that could bring in jobs and help people?

 

You have to understand that there is little truth in what Gatewood says.

So far, the entire sum of the costs of failed althernative energy direct subsidies has been quite small. In fact, it's less than 5% of all the money that the Federal government has paid out.

You might have the impression that it's far larger, but that's because of constant repitition by the noise machine.

Solyndra was a tiny loss by Federal government standards, yet the GOP has made it onto a code word that gets the bobble heads bobbing.

Gatewood's blanket innuendo that all this money went to Obama donors is not supported by fact.

In the Solyndra case, the GOP went to great lenghts to show that one of Solyndra's investors had an arm's length relationship with an Obama bundler. They neglected to note that the Bush adminstration was prepared to make the same loan to Solyndra, but the clock ran out on them before they could hand over the money.

The also neglect to say that the real reason that Solyndra failed was because the Chinese dumped cheap silicon panels on the market, driving down the cost of solar panels, and driving the threat presented by Soyndra's inproved technology out of business.

China drove Solyndra into insolvency, not mismanagment or graft. Who does the GOP blame? Obama!

 

"Republicans Are Determined To Stop Renewable Energy"

Roughly 65% of renewable energy is produced in 2012 Red states.

 

To be fair, they would be classified as middle-class. Therefore it strengthened the middle class.

 

If that is true, and I see no reason not to believe it, then the fact that the representatives of those states vote in lockstep AGAINST the interests of the renewables industry is yet another example of conservatives voting against their own best interests.

 

Wellllll . . . I did spend most of eight years posting mostly against very nearly everything G.W. Bush said or did and so -- yep -- I'd cut no GOP president any slack on this either if his or her results turned out to be just as negative in nature.

 

So you believe that the GOP is selfish for being selfless? interesting.

The government, in both Red and blue control, focuses its renewable efforts on mass production by corporate suppliers. As this point in time, small production by end-users is the only viable option, but the government has no interest in one consuming less. As far as I can tell, the current oil policy is for the US to support a higher price in order to make the price less volatile while incentivizing the market pressure for alternatives. If price falls significantly, then supply falls significantly as fracking goes into the red, which then makes the prices more volatile. Commercial operations certainly are looking into alternatives like natural gas over gas or diesel, and a lot of effort has gone into researching things like biofuels, but finding the best alternative takes time to become scalable, and we just aren't there yet. It has little to do with red v. blue, and more to do with these things take time to sort themselves out.

 

As an arch-Conservative, I've got little love for the RINO's who have all but wrecked the Republican Party. That said, and on thread topic, if we had any kind of Republican administration we would surely see these features regarding energy:

1. A halt in the Democrat war against oil and coal. We have CUBIC MILES of relatively clean coal deposits to provide economic electrical power for many decades to come, and we have efficient, state-of-the-art electrostatic scrubbers to remove the exhaust emissions from the exhausts of coal-powered energy plants.
2. We would see an IMMEDIATE approval of the Keystone Pipeline. Yesterday, Obama announced he won't issue one of his kingly decrees regarding Keystone until AFTER the November elections.
3. A Republican administration would probably tell the "green industry" enthusiasts to bring in proposals that have well thought-out, demonstrable cost/price benefits -- not some bunch of pie-in-the-sky, "hippie-dip" fantastic nonsense that will cost American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars, for NOTHING!

Let me be clear. The ONLY outside-the-box energy development we should be sinking public R&D money into is the Holy Grail of hydrogen fusion -- period! For this we should be willing to spend nearly anything, because it would provide limitless energy using molecules found in sea water and produce no polluting exhausts at all. But isn't interesting that you don't see any interest being expressed in hydrogen fusion by either RINO's or the hyperliberal goofballs who would have us burning "biomass" and cow dung rather than coal....

 

The entire point of my post was to get alternative energy sources up and running. I know we can continue to use fossil fuels for our energy needs but that's not really going to benefit us because our entire economy is based on the cost of a barrel of oil. I want to see the government investing in alternative energy sources not because they'll be profitable for some businessman to run, but because it's absolutely essential to our economy, to our environment, and to our national security to do so. I don't care about profits because this isn't something we need to be doing so somebody can make a lot of money. The entire point of having the government get it started is so that there isn't a profit motive.

I'm fine with the keystone pipeline and I'm fine with coal. I'm just not fine if that's all we're doing because that's a boneheaded shortsighted strategy.

I'm also in favor of using nuclear power and hydrogen fusion. Lets use everything we can possibly use as long as we're actually doing something to diversify beyond fossil fuels instead of arguing back and forth over what is profitable as if profits are the most important concern here.

 

I do agree with you about everything you've said here, except for the endorsement of nuclear power. Truly, Turtle, light-water fission nuclear reactors are surely the worst idea that mankind has ever had. And, even if they were safe, which they most definitely are not, they are phenomenally expensive, to build, operate, and then decommission, and get rid of. But thank you for your endorsement of hydrogen fusion... you'd be surprised how many people have no idea what that is. Perhaps if more of us on the Left, and the Right can get behind hydrogen fusion, then we'll finally be free from using coal at all, and we'll use oil only as a lubricant. All the best.

 

We all lost money....if you pay federal taxes. If all you pay is sales tax, you really didn't lose ^$*#*#@. If A republican gave tax money to his friends, most people would be pissed about that.

 

You could always let the free market find alternative energy sources.
And you could be a part of that. Just stop buying your energy from companies that use coal fire plants.
If enough people refuse to use coal energy then it will become economically viable to research new energy sources.

You only have yourselves to blame if you continue to use energy derived from fossil fuels.