Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 08/13/2011 11:56:35 AM PDT by Mikey_1962
Should energy consumers pay extra taxes to fund government-mandated and subsidized renewable energy technologies? "Absolutely yes," says John Bryson, President Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary. He made the remark at a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009 and went on to extol the virtues of hidden rates in California, a state encumbered with some of the nation's highest electricity and unemployment rates.
Bryson, retired CEO of the electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE) and its parent company Edison International, excused the practice, saying, "That's been a part of the regulatory environment for the investor-owned utilities for as long as I've been close to it."
He has been close to it for more than three decades, but his resume shows that the current regulatory environment is largely his legacy rather than his inheritance. His bureaucratic career began in 1976 when then-Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to California's State Water Resources Control Board and as chair of the state Public Utilities Commission three years later. David Bier of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes the outcome of his public service. "Bryson helped create a regulatory structure that fixed utilities' profits at a percent of costs. As a result, the utilities make money not by bringing costs down and selling more electricity, but by raising costs with unnecessary, expensive and redundant projects." In his August 3 op-ed, Bier also detailed several government bailouts Bryson secured for SCE during his tenure that saved the utility from bankruptcy and funded his $65 million retirement package in 2008.
Writing for the Cal Watchdog, Wayne Lusvardi explains Bryson's current interest in government subsidies of renewable energy technology. "Today Bryson serves as CEO and President of BrightSource Energy and is on the board of Coda Automotive, both heavily dependent on government subsidies," he wrote. "BrightSource Energy is the recipient of a $1.37 billion Federal loan guarantee to build a seven square mile solar energy project in the Mojave Desert."
Senator James Inhofe (R–Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, described Bryson as the "founder of the radical Natural Resources Defense Council, a left-wing environmentalist organization, which in the name of global warming, seeks to increase drastically the price of electricity and gasoline across America." In July, Inhofe placed a hold on Bryson's nomination, in cooperation with a grass-roots movement launched by the American Conservative Union and Freedom Action Campaign (FAC). In an FAC press release, Brian McGraw called Bryson an environmental ideologue and drew the analogy: "Imagine how environmentalists would react to the CEO of ExxonMobil being elected to run the Environmental Protection Agency."
Suffocate the trees! YEAH!! Woo woo!!!
We all know haw taxes stimulate job growth and how carbon hurts life. Ummm - I may have that backwards!
This “carbon tax” is a bigger scam than global warming. I can’t believe anybody could fall for this.
What he actually was saying it that they need a way to steal more of other people’s money to pay for their BIG, nanny state government.
LOL,,, that is soooooo retro. Did i get in a time machine and step out in 5 years ago?
“BrightSource Energy is the recipient of a $1.37 billion Federal loan guarantee to build a seven square mile solar energy project in the Mojave Desert.”
But we can’t drill in ANWR because it is a “pristine widerness.”
You have to look hard to find nominees with viewpoints this antithetical to the mission of their departments.
Save the planet, buy my bridge.
Perry calls global warming “all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.”
That’s one of the strongest statements I’ve seen from any presidential hopeful. For a supposed internationalist he’s certainly not towing the line on the global warming/carbon tax/save the planet meme very well.
Hadn’t heard that. Good to know.
Wasn’t this the guy in California screwing around with Enron?
Should energy consumers demand that communists and communist sympathizers be tried for treason and punished accordingly?
the carbon tax is merely one tentacle OF the global warming hoax.
...the idea is the tax will reduce CO2, which will reduce global warming.
(nevermind that the earth has cooled since 2003, and CO2 doesn’t cause warming, and humans produced 5.5 CO2 compared to plants 126 annually, so even if any of it were true, which it’s not, the human contribution to a trace gas is miniscule.)
...AGW is the greatest, most costly hoax, in human history.
The Marxists in office intend to tax everything there is.
This “carbon” tax will probably end up - forgive the pun - being a tax on the skidmarks in our undershorts.
With government inspectors provided by the TSA.
Ain’t Marxism grand.
Why stop there?
Maybe we should give tax credits for abortion too. After all they’re just conscientious women who are preventing another breather from destroying the planet.
He is a shining example of corporatism and all of its evils. Corporatism of course is not a component of capitalism, but of socialism.
Hardly a free market idea.
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