Joe Manchin saved US taxpayers $300 billion by rejecting bad climate policy
by Robert Bryce, Opinion Contributor - 07/20/22 11:30 AM ET
Joe Manchin did Americans a big favor last week by pulling his support for a bill that included some $300 billion in subsidies for solar and wind power and electric cars. Indeed, the Democratic senator from West Virginia spared taxpayers from wasting money on the same misguided energy policies that have resulted in what Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation rightly calls “Europe’s worst energy cost and security crisis since the Second World War.”
Manchin’s move is also a win against corporate welfare and a win for rural America. Of course, that’s not what you’ve likely heard.
Former Obama adviser, John Podesta, indulged in some world-class hyperbole, saying it was “odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.” In an opinion piece published by the New York Times, Leah Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, personally attacked Manchin, saying she has “never understood” how Manchin “looks his grandchildren in the eye. … His legacy is climate destruction.”
Balderdash.
These hollow attacks on Manchin are happening at the same moment that Europe is in the midst of a crisis that was caused by the same energy policies that the NGO-corporate-congressional-climate complex wants to impose on American consumers. What Podesta, Stokes and their allies on the left refuse to see (or acknowledge) is that Manchin was correct to reject the green corporatism and unilateral energy disarmament that has put Europe on the precipice of disaster. The causes of Europe’s crisis are obvious: too much spending on weather-dependent renewables, too little spending on hydrocarbon production, too much reliance on imported energy, and the closure of too many coal and nuclear plants.
Last month, Reuters reported that German consumers “could see a doubling or tripling of their energy costs, which in some cases are already between 30 percent and 80 percent higher due to price increases from last fall.” In Britain, residential customers are paying about 43 percent more for their household energy than they were last year and prices are expected to jump another 65 percent in October.
In a report released last week, John Constable, the director of energy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, found that between 2008 and 2021, the European Union spent around $781 billion on renewable-energy subsidies, and those subsidies continue to add some $70 billion to consumers’ bills every year. The EU’s energy policies, he said, have been an “unmitigated disaster” that have resulted in “high energy prices and dramatically falling energy consumption suggesting societal and real economic decay.”
Manchin’s veto is a vote against the corporate welfare that has been driving solar and wind energy deployment in the U.S. According to data from the Treasury Department, credits for wind and solar are the most expensive energy-related provisions in the tax code. Between 2021 and 2031, the investment tax credit (ITC), used by the solar industry, will cost federal taxpayers about $60 billion. The production tax credit (PTC), which expired at the beginning of this year and is used by the wind industry, will cost nearly $53 billion. For comparison, the oil and gas sector will get about $29 billion in tax credits and the nuclear sector will get $3.4 billion.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. An “apples-to-apples” comparison shows that last year, the solar sector got 267 times more in federal tax credits per unit of energy produced than the nuclear industry. The wind energy sector got 99 times more.
This is lunacy. There is no way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions without nuclear energy — and lots of it. And yet, the tax code is punishing nuclear power. In the past 15 months alone, two nuclear plants — Palisades in Michigan, and Indian Point in New York — were prematurely shuttered. There are several reasons why those plants were closed but one of the biggest ones is that tax policy is so skewed toward solar and wind.
more
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3564923-joe-manchin-saved-us-taxpayers-300-billion-by-rejecting-bad-climate-policy/
