PG&E Wants Higher Rates Even While Collecting Millions for Improvements Never Made?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Since the several disastrous accidents that claimed the lives of too many Californians, Pacific Gas & Electric has been fighting criticism over its dismal safety record. In response, the energy provider cried poor and said it needed billions for upgrades and repairs and wanted ratepayers to pay even more for its services. But a new report says that PG&E collected millions from ratepayers for repairs and improvements that it never actually made.

Early last year PG&E got a large rate increase, but by August the energy provider was at it again asking for an additional $2.2 billion for upgrades, repairs, and improving its explosion-prone delivery system, a cost to be born on the backs of the ratepayers.

This January, though, the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) reported that PG&E has already collected half a billion dollars that was supposed to go to these repairs and upgrades yet the repairs were never made.
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PG&E Wants Higher Rates Even While Collecting Millions for Improvements Never Made?”


The ‘Solar Decathalon’ That Needed a Gas Generator for Cloudy Days

-By Warner Todd Huston

What happens when the sun refuses to shine on a PR event for solar power…

Yeah, look to the right under the sign. Yep, that’s a gas generator powering the “solar” sign.

Brett Jacobson was alerted to this hilarious example of the unviable nature of solar power as a reliable source of energy.

It was too deliciously funny to ignore.
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The ‘Solar Decathalon’ That Needed a Gas Generator for Cloudy Days”


EPA to Give Itself Powers to Preemptively Deny Natural Resource Development?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Once again an Obama regulatory agency tries to give itself wild new powers, powers that would crush American energy and natural resource development, powers meant to quash the business sector.

A press release from Resourceful Earth News imparts a warning about the Environmental Protection Agency’s newest powergrab. A lfet-wing Democrat Senator is asking the EPA to accept the idea of taking upon itself the power to deny mining or development of other natural resources before any scientific studies or any permitting procedures even begin. This Senator wants the EPA to just say no because, well, simply because it feels like it.

This effort is at the behest of Washington Senator Maria Cantwell (Dem.) who is urging the EPA to invoke the Clean Water Act to put a permanent end to the development of Pebble Mine in Alaska. Pebble Mine owners have already spent $120 million over three years to satisfy federal and state government regulations. Expensive and expansive scientific studies and environmental studies have already been conducted but now that the EPA has agreed to launch its scientific analysis of the mine, Cantwell wants the EPA to preempt the environmental review process the EPA itself put in place and simply decide to prevent the operation of the mine out of hand with no science needed to back it up.
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EPA to Give Itself Powers to Preemptively Deny Natural Resource Development?”


Solyndra: Green Jobbery, Green Robbery

-By Warner Todd Huston

We have come to learn something about our president. He really loves green. But what we can’t quite decipher is if that green is green jobs and energies or just the good old fashioned green of tax money. Whatever the case, it sure is true that the green of U.S. tax dollars is far more prevalent with “O” than those mythical green jobs he’s trying to fund with it and this mess with failed green company Solyndra is revealing quite a lot.

Now, firstly lets dispense with the left’s weak defense of this whole Solyndra mess, shall we?

Left-wing organization The Center for American Progress is trying to take the spotlight off Obama and Biden and off the current administration’s culpability for the millions in tax dollars given Solyndra by informing everyone that the first time a federal loan to the green company was broached was during the waning weeks of George W. Bush’s presidency.
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Solyndra: Green Jobbery, Green Robbery”


No Spark: The Unanswered Questions of the Chevy Volt

-By Warner Todd Huston

Every time we turn around these days President Obama is touting the idea that the “future” of America lies in green energy and one of those greenie ideas is an Obama favorite: electric cars. Not to let him down, Government Motors has obliged by pushing the Chevy Volt as the car of the future. But thus far the future looks a lot like GM’s present; a whole lot of failure leaving a whole lot of questions.

While Obama continues to tout his — meaning our — investment in GM others are not so sanguine. For instance, billionaire Warren Buffet has invested in a Chinese electric car company instead of putting his considerable investment acumen to use with the Chevy Volt. Buffet may be a dolt on taxes, but apparently his investing senses haven’t gotten any spark from the Volt.

One of the reasons that Buffet went for the Chinese company is that some of its technology seems superior to various systems of the Chevy Volt. According to Forbes, Buffet has targeted the company because the, “car can travel 186 miles, more than the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, on a single charge with a top speed of 87 miles per hour.”
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No Spark: The Unanswered Questions of the Chevy Volt”


Obama’s New EPA Rules Would Destroy Our Energy Sector

-By Warner Todd Huston

Half of America’s energy comes from coal-fired power plants but Obama’s new EPA rules would about destroy the coal industry driving our energy costs through the roof. That’s not all they would do, either.

Even Paul Bedard of USNews says that Obama’s new EPA rules will “slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost.”

Analysis by the National Economic Research Associates says that these two new EPA regulations would be “among the most expensive ever imposed by the agency on coal-fueled power plants, dramatically increasing electricity rates and natural gas prices and leading to substantial job losses,” and would cost the U.S. electric sector nearly $18 billion a year.
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Obama’s New EPA Rules Would Destroy Our Energy Sector”