Western countries climate policies are a disaster but it would all be fine if it ended up as misdirected belief. Mankind has suffered from these bouts of ideological extremism time and time again. Unfortunately, there is a not-so-insignificant corollary to this: Our energy policies.
And energy policies are truly important. It is in fact THE most important things that you can't get wrong for a country to prosper. You can pray to the gods you want, burn the witches you like, if you get your energy right, there will be no consequences. But if not...
Well, we are about to find out. The canary in the coal mine to take an appropriate image is Germany. The country got rid of its nuclear energy which was providing it's base load. Then mostly of it's coal and fuel power plants to limit CO2 production and finally of its gas from Russia for strategic reasons. So in the end, the country is now left with expensive variable options, the "renewables" and even more expensive American gas. (And some extremely polluting lignite from the Eastern part of the country.)
This is ideology, so you can't oppose such policies. Many companies rightly have opted to profit handsomely, especially in the US. Who can blame them? For the rest of us, an ice age of expensive energy and low productivity is coming. And for society as a whole, decline and finally floundering into irrelevance.
Can't happen? Look at Japan who went from 16% of the world economy (based on an over inflated Yen that much is true) to just below 3% in 30 years. Most people did terrible. The Shoshas (great Japanese conglomerates) did rather well.
Authored by Stephen Moore via The Epoch Times,
President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes.
It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.
But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart.
They pay billions in taxes.
The culprits here are the very companies that President Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.
It turns out that despite all the promises over the past decade about how renewable energy is the future of power production in America, by far the biggest tax dodgers in the country are the wind and solar power industries.
Over the past several decades, the green energy lobby—what I call the climate-change-industrial complex—isn’t paying its fair share. That’s because the vast majority of these companies pay nearly ZERO income taxes.
But they wade in rivers of federal direct and indirect subsidies that keep these zombie companies alive. Over the past two decades, the renewable energy lobby has collected more than one-quarter trillion dollars in subsidies—payments that we’ve been assured over and over would be temporary. The argument for these grants, loans, tax abatements and other sweetheart kisses is that these were “infant industries” in need of a Head Start program for CEOs.
Except these companies have never even reached puberty after all these years.
What’s worse is that President Biden keeps spoiling the children with lavish gifts for bad performance.
A new report by tax expert Adam Michel at the Cato Institute finds the green energy subsidies—mostly created by Biden policies like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act—will drain the Treasury of as much as $1.8 trillion over 10 years.
The Cato report finds that since its passage, “the estimated cost of the IRA’s new and expanded energy tax credits increased dramatically.”
These tax shelters are just a form of Aid to Dependent Corporations. They never seem to want to cut the umbilical cord.
What have we gotten for this mountain of taxpayer-funded green energy largesse?
Nothing, really.
Today, we still get 80 percent of our energy in America from fossil fuels and nuclear power. Wind and solar are stuck at less than 10 percent. This is some investment we’re making.
Meanwhile, President Biden keeps railing against companies that pay no income tax. He’s advocated a mandatory 15 percent minimum corporate tax. But guess what industry is explicitly exempt from the minimum? The green energy lobby.
It’s just a reminder that a lot of people are getting really, really rich off climate change hysteria.
The “green” in green energy doesn’t stand for a cleaner environment.
It stands for the color of money. Yours and mine.
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