Posted on 07/09/2010 3:32:48 PM PDT by DBeers
TRENTON - Last month, a state utilities board voted to allocate $15 million in federal stimulus money for grants to make businesses more energy efficient.
The money for the program, which seeks to lower New Jersey residents' utility bills by reducing demand from the biggest users of the electric grid, should have come from a fee assessed on major commercial and industrial users since 2003.
But the Retail Margin Fund, which holds that revenue, is empty - among the consequences of hundreds of millions of dollars in diversions from "dedicated" funds to help the state close a multibillion-dollar budget gap.
Budget documents show that environmental and clean-energy programs designed to reduce New Jersey household and commercial utility bills are being hit particularly hard, with about $400 million rerouted into the state's general fund.
The state raided $128 million from the Retail Margin Fund, which is generated by fees from commercial and industrial users, in the fiscal year that ended June 30, and will take $14 million under the $29.4 billion budget signed into law last week.
Greg Reinert, spokesman for the Board of Public Utilities, said the fund had never spent the money collected over the years.
Today, he said, "there's nothing left in it."
Just last year, the state enacted a law authorizing the fund to spend $60 million on combined-heat-and-power grants for businesses. The program aimed to help the state develop 1,500 megawatts of cogeneration capacity by 2020.
Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D., Somerset), a primary sponsor of the 2009 law, criticized the shift of $15 million in stimulus money to fund the cogeneration program as a one-shot fix.
The fund is paid into by business customers "who are hurting with higher energy costs. By taking their money away and not giving it back to them, to balance the budget, it's totally inappropriate," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
New Jersey is one of ten States participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) CO2 Budget Trading Program
Through RGGI; Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont are implementing the first mandatory cap-and-trade program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite this news from New Jersey (I suspect just the tip of the iceberg among these 10 progressive green states) one reads this accolade from one of my 'favorite' leftist fronts The Proof is in the Pudding: Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Shows Pollution Pricing Works:
As Congress looks for a way to price global warming pollution at the federal level, 10 Northeastern states have already put in place a market-based carbon emissions reduction program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which just completed its seventh successful auction of pollution permits. While opponents of clean energy reform falsely claim that a cap-and-trade system would harm the economy, RGGI provides a working model and active case study of how reducing pollution can actually drive economic growth...Center for American Progress
Sorry..I’m missing the corruption here?
Secondarily, I agree with you that this whole Carbon pricing scheme is a way for people to literally conjure up $$$ out of the air, using political force.
Sophisticated blackmail actually.
But making off based allegations undercuts your acurate 9and serious) argument.
I term it corrupt when money is approved for under a designated for purpose and then used for another purpose. This type of corruption may now be common place in government; however, it is my contention that it remains corruption nonetheless...
Look, if no one is coddled about the real cost of energy, then energy costs themselves ARE (or would be) the natural incentive, for business or homeowner, to make improvements that will raise their energy efficiency and lower their energy demands and their costs.
Instead, the political rate setting process keeps rates low enough that no one thinks they need to make real improvements in their energy efficiency, so no one does, unless some politician promises to take money from someone else to help them do it. It’s a shell game, that’s all.
The public-utility regulation and rate setting process does two things. It sets artificially low rates and in return insures energy suppliers have near-monopolies. Both conditions remove the natural market forces that would spur innovation, competition and greater energy efficiency.
The rate setting process claims to prevent “price gouging” while what it really does is insure the absence of the means for true and sufficient price competition (as opposed to the artificial, “alternative supplier” mandates created NOT by market forces but political fiat).
All the energy related mandates and subsidies are feeble attempts to resolve problems that over-regulation, mandates and subsidies have created.
Sorry..I’m missing the corruption here?You described corruption yet can't see it in your own words.------
a way for people to literally conjure up $$$ out of the air, using political force.
Contextually challenged are you?
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