Colorado’s Windy Senator

by Joshua Sharf | 8:04 pm, May 18, 2012

In our last post, we looked at Sen. Mark Udall’s claims that Colorado’s renewables mandate had been a “great success.” This time, let’s look at his claims that “…wind, now, competes with coal and some would argue is actually cheaper than coal.”

The only way that someone could make that claim is if they ignored the subsidies that wind gets in comparison with anything we get electricity from today (that CBO report was issued just a few weeks ago at the behest of the very committee in which Udall serves and made his remarks):

The jobs that Bennet brags about include those from Vestas, which the company admits only exist because of those subsidies.

The proof, of course, is in the markets. The energy that could successfully compete with a power source that has its capital expenditures almost completely amortized – most coal plants were built decades ago – would seem to be a natural for investors. Unfortunately, well…

Proponents of wind energy will point to the various externalities associated with coal. Of course, wind has a few externalities of its own, like bird kills, higher local temperatures, and downwind crop & building damage.

Sorry, Mr. Udall.  Wind isn’t competitive with coal, and although the Obama administration seems hell-bent on driving up the cost of coal, they’ve got a way to go, notwithstanding all the damage they’ll do to your wallet in the process.  It’s not even close, and they still try to cheat.

Original Post: View From a Height » PPC

Controversial NREL Director to Chair National Science Board

by amy | 1:44 pm, May 18, 2012

In the wake of controversial comments advocating the end of fossil fuels as sources for US energy in order to combat global warming, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Director Dan Arvizu has been elected Chairman of the National Science Board (NSB) according to an NREL press release.

Just days ago during the World Renewable Energy Forum, Arvizu stated, “’fossil fuels should be phased out by 2040 to blunt man-made climate change,’”… and that natural gas is little more than “’a nice bridge technology, but not the answer we are looking for in terms of a transition and transformation,’” away from fossil fuels and toward alternatives such as wind, solar, and biofuels, of which NREL is a champion.

According to the NSB’s Web site,

The National Science Board has two important roles. First, it establishes the policies of NSF [National Science Foundation] within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the President and the Congress. In this capacity, the Board identifies issues that are critical to NSF’s future, approves NSF’s strategic budget directions and the annual budget submission to the Office of Management and Budget, and approves new major programs and awards. The second role of the Board is to serve as an independent body of advisors to both the President and the Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering and education in science and engineering. In addition to major reports, the NSB also publishes occasional policy papers or statements on issues of importance to U.S. science and engineering.

The NREL press release describes the NSB:

The 25-member body advises the president and Congress on science and engineering issues, and is the policy-setting and budget-approving body for the National Science Foundation. With an annual budget of $6.9 billion, the foundation funds about 20 percent of all federally supported basic scientific research at U.S. colleges and universities. Arvizu will serve a two-year term as chairman.

With an anti-fossil fuel, global warming alarmist like Arvizu at the helm of the NSB, the politicalization of science will continue when it comes to energy policy.

Original Post: Energy Policy Center

2012 Colorado Legislative Wrap-Up

by Jon Caldara | 12:42 pm, May 18, 2012

Unleash your inner political geek this Friday night by tuning in to the Independence Institute’s public affairs TV show Devil’s Advocate as Fox 31 political reporter Eli Stokols and Associated Press reporter Kristen Wyatt join me to survey the damage from the 2012 Colorado legislative session. That’s this Friday night on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast Monday at 1:30PM.

Original Post: Jon Caldara » PPC

Julia and the European Elections

by Kelly Sloan | 11:15 am, May 18, 2012

The Left’s symbiotic attachment to the culture of dependency was made clear in two different ways, on two sides of the Atlantic, earlier this month.

First, the Obama campaign rolled out their web-based storybook ad, “The Life of Julia”, a slideshow depicting the life of a fictional female cartoon character, showing how government programs, nurtured by the Obama administration, supported her at every stage of her life. And, of course, foreshadowing the terrible consequences to her access to the government trough should the cruel Romney/Ryan regime kick in.

For conservatives, this computer-designed illustration of a cradle-to-grave welfare state was considered political manna from heaven; Julia jokes abounded, over-dubs of the ad replacing the chimerical with reality popped up in several venues (such as this one from Kelly Maher), and it was generally derided as an incredibly ill-conceived project.

And yet, it ran. And the assumption must be made that a sadly growing segment of the American population identifies with the tragic, pathetic figure featured in the ad.

Now let’s consider the elections held in Europe, most notably in France and Greece, a few days later. Voters in France elected Socialist Francois Hollande as President, while a far-left coalition in Greece made significant gains against the sitting government, in what is seen as an anti-austerity backlash.

A backlash against what? Well, against the notion that the people in these countries cannot continue to live off the hard work and prudence of others. In these nations, as in most of Europe, cradle-to-grave addiction to government is the norm, and woe betide any official who steps forward to point out that that may be causing a bit of an existential problem.

The electoral results from these nations, populated as they are with several million real-life Julia’s, is no surprise to the American left. Liberalism has long realized that the surest route to success is to create a semi-permanent underclass that relies on government largesse, and that will submissively vote to continue that relationship.

That notion has always met resistance in the United States, where individual initiative, economic freedom, and decentralized government produced conjointly the freest society and greatest economic gains in human history. But that resistance is waning.

The creation of this underclass is a sadly easy task, and the Julia ad, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates this clearly. Miss Julia’s primary relationship in the slideshow is with government – little mention of parents, church, community (aside from her volunteering at a community garden in her retirement, which is funded by a social security system that is presumed to be magically still around in 60-odd years). Government, in Julia’s world, takes on the role of family, educator, doctor, provider… And why not? Every liberal measure of the past 60 years – social, economic, or symbolic — has been geared towards just that.

Julia is the American liberal’s ideal – a modern person, ostensibly free of the constraints of antiquated orders and institutions, but in reality little more than a ward of the state, umbilically tied to the government. And the more she becomes reliant on the state to replace those antiquated institutions, the harder it becomes to cut the cord. And the more likely she will be to continue voting for her providers.

In most of Europe (with the piquant exception of Eastern Europe, whose own disastrous and bloodier venture in state supremacy remains a not-too-distant memory) this is structural, and has been for a while, explaining the insistence of the Greeks and French to vote to hasten their own calamity. The immediate results of the European rejection of financial discipline, in favor of a plan to try and fight fire with napalm – a precipitous drop in the Euro, warnings to Greece that failure to live up to its end of the deal will result in expulsion from the EU, a near-run on Greek banks that is in its third day at the time of this writing – were both unsurprising and widely predicted; and yet the specter of losing any morsel of their erstwhile free lunches trumped any other consideration for a large number of European Julia’s, conditioned for generations towards such servility.

The question in the United States, highlighted by the Julia ad, is whether this nation has travelled far enough down this path to entrench the establishment of a society where government is the predominant driver and institution in daily life, or if a return to a society where the state is restricted to a defined role, and restrained from breeding a cult of dependence, remains possible.

Fox 31, AP Reporters on Devil’s Advocate Television

by Mike Krause | 10:47 am, May 18, 2012

Unleash your inner political geek tonight by tuning in to the Independence Institute’s public affairs tv show Devil’s Advocate as Fox 31 political reporter Eli Stokols and Associated Press reporter Kristen Wyatt join host Jon Caldara to survey the damage from the 2012 Colorado legislative session. That’s Friday nights on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast Mondays at 1:30PM.

Original Post: Jon Caldara » PPC

Colorado’s Diminished-Capacity Senator

by Joshua Sharf | 9:08 am, May 18, 2012

Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources took up the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012, which would “require covered electricity retailers to supply a specified share of their electricity sales from qualifying clean energy resources.” The target would start at 24% in 2015, climbing to its final, and permanent level of 84% by 2035. Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) made the following comments:

“With that, let me just say that this bill would be a step in the right direction. I also want to emphasize that I still support, as I know do many of my colleagues, a renewable electricity standard nationally. We’ve had great success in the State of Colorado with the renewable electricity standard, and I would argue in fact, we felt less of the effect of this Great Recession because of our energy sector’s capacity to innovate, create jobs, and provide power that’s less and less expensive. We all know for example that wind, now, competes with coal and some would argue is actually cheaper than coal.”

There’s enough material to keep us occupied for a week – and it may – but we’ll start with the idea that Colorado’s Renewable Electricity Standard has been a “great success.”

It may have been a great success for Xcel and its shareholders, but for the ratepayers, it’s a slowly building vacuum, sucking more and more of their decidedly non-renewable dollars. In 2011, the RES was responsible for something like 4.5% of Coloradoans’ electricity bills, and number that is only going to grow over time, as the RES ramps up to its final 30% requirement in 2020:

According to the Public Service Company’s 2010 RES Compliance Plan, the ECA is projected to be $6.3 million this year, before it balloons to $141 million in 2012. It then increases exponentially to $738 million in 2020, or almost 23 percent of total retail electricity sales—none of which would count against the 2 percent retail rate impact.

Assuming 1.5 million ratepayers in Colorado (current figure is 1.3 million) in 2020, and the mandated 20 percent renewable standard, the ECA cost alone will average nearly $500 per year per ratepayer.

The ECA is the Electric Commodity Adjustment, and it’s the means by which Xcel gets around the 2% per year rate limit that is supposed to protect consumers from the fact that renewables are, contra, Sen. Udall, much more expensive than traditional sources of electricity. More about that in a succeeding post.

The Colorado plan, if extended to the country as a whole, will have the same deleterious effects on peoples businesses and homes. That link at the top of the page was to an Energy Information Agency study showing the effects of the proposed standard. Not only would the BCES cost dozens of gigawatts of capacity by 2035:

It would also raise the cost of electricity by about 18%:

If you look closely, you see that the EIA assumes that nuclear will take the place of coal’s baseline capacity, but in fact, the extremely large up-front capital expenditures may make that prohibitively expensive, in which case we’ll have no choice but to cover as much as we can with solar and wind. The result of that little dream scenario? We have more capacity, but the price is 20% higher, rather than 18%. The increase in supply still isn’t enough to make up for the extra cost of wind and solar as sources.

Coloradans have excellent reason to wonder why their senator thinks that paying more than neighboring states for their electricity constitutes a “great success,” and Americans should run like the wind from any effort to replicate the experiment nationally.

Original Post: View From a Height » PPC

Colorado K-12 Funding for the 21st Century: Toward Mass Customized Learning?

by Eddie | 3:24 pm, May 17, 2012

I’m a little bit tired today, having Tweeted up a storm at the Donnell-Kay Foundation’s Colorado Summit on Blended Learning. I have neither the time nor the energy to recap the great presentations from the likes of iNACOL’s David Teeter, Utah Senator Howard Stephenson, New Hampshire Deputy Commissioner Paul Leather, Colorado Department of Education Assistant Commissioner Amy Anderson and Colorado Senator Michael Johnston.

But I can take advantage of the incredible timing to share a brand-new issue paper from my Education Policy Center friends titled Online Course-Level Funding: Toward Colorado Secondary Self-Blended Learning Options. It’s about following the lead of states like Utah and Florida to give students more freedom of course selection through the power of digital technology and a system that allows the funding to follow:

To win support for significant statewide changes, a cross-section of 10 or more school districts could be selected to pilot the program locally. Yet regardless of how rapidly it is implemented, Colorado needs to empower students to direct funds among numerous effective course options to help fulfill the potential of blended learning and to unleash new opportunities to improve students’ academic development.

In essence, the report focuses on one key area of systemic change that needs to take place in our state’s antique education system. Which made it altogether fitting that Donnell-Kay executive director Tony Lewis closed the meeting with a call to move beyond the focus on using tools like blended learning to improve education and instead take on the major task of systemic transformation. Count me on board, and let me nominate mass customized learning as a possible term to describe what Colorado should be after.

I need to investigate the thinking behind the term a little more myself. Meanwhile, let the conversation begin, er, continue….

Original Post: Ed is Watching

ProgressNow Colorado and ALEC

by T.L. James | 7:58 am, May 17, 2012

Oooh, looky what our friends at ProgressNow have been up to lately – ALEC And The Left’s War On Free Speech:

If you want an insight into today’s left, look at its multifront war against the American Legislative Exchange Council for committing the grave sin of pushing free-market bills in state legislatures.

At a recent meeting in Washington, Aniello Alioto of ProgressNow Colorado summed up the left-wing’s campaign against ALEC: “Never relent, never let up pressure, and always increase.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, ProgressNow was one of several left-wing groups meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters earlier this month to plot their ongoing campaign against ALEC. Other groups included Common Cause and the Color of Change.

The latter being, of course, Marxist Van Jones’ speech-squelching group.

Remember: the left does not want to debate the issues, they do not want to see the best policy win in a marketplace of ideas, because they know if they are honest about what they want they will lose every time. They want to shut down dissenting voices through intimidation and harassment. That’s what groups like ProgressNow are really about – stifling dissent and suppressing opposition.

Adams 12 Teachers Fired for Alleged Theft Resurrects Tenure Reform Debate

by Eddie | 11:36 am, May 16, 2012

On Monday night, Denver CBS4 investigator Rick Sallinger broke a story about Adams 12 dismissing two teachers for allegedly bilking thousands of dollars in PTO funds that were supposed to go for student trips. I never like to see such a story as the one featured in the 3-minute video. Interviewed by Sallinger, school board president Mark Clark made a great point:

We hold our kids accountable. We have them expelled or suspended for their behavior. I think the same rules apply for everybody.

The husband-and-wife educator duo look to be in hot water. According to the CBS4 report, the decision to pursue firing Johnny and Pamela Trujillo followed an internal district audit. I’m not able to comment on the specifics of the case to presume anyone’s guilt, but if further investigation confirms the truth of the serious charges, it also reflects on an important policy: teacher tenure (aka “due process”).

In our state tenure reform is still a live issue, with some of the best reasons articulated by Dr. Marcus Winters in his April 12 Independence Institute talk on Teachers Matter. After three years, Colorado teachers automatically acquire a special property right to their job. Eventually, a 2010 state law will tie earning the right to three years of demonstrated effectiveness in the classroom. But even if SB 191 had taken effect by now, it wouldn’t affect a case like the one taking place in Adams 12.

I was left with a few questions after watching the CBS4 investigative report, such as: Is the union representing the accused teachers? How much has the district spent, and how much does it expect to spend, in legal fees to prosecute the dismissal? How many more appeals remain, and how long before the issue will be settled?

Notable past cases in Colorado show that it easily can cost more than $100,000 to remove a tenured teacher and take several years to reach an outcome. Adams 12 officials must believe they have a strong case, because that’s not money and time to be taken lightly.

On a related note, Ed News Colorado reports a different kind of investigation — this one requested of the state department of education by Denver Public Schools — to determine whether two schools cheated on state tests to get their good results. I certainly hope it turns out not to be true. Most educators have a lot of integrity, but a few bad apples can spoil a lot.

Anyway, as the case regarding Beach Court Elementary and Hallett Fundamental Academy unfolds, please take into advisement my comments from last year’s Atlanta scandal about a “predictable overreaction.”

Original Post: Ed is Watching

Please Stand Up for Colorado!

by Jon Caldara | 1:02 pm, May 15, 2012

As an organization married to principles, not politics or politicians, we at the Independence Institute have it easy. We stand unequivocally for the ideals presented in the Declaration of Independence – the document that inspired our name. Part of my job as head of the Institute is to lead the fight for free markets, individual liberty, and limited government. Part of that last principle about limiting government is adhering to the 10th Amendment  – even when inconvenient! What I mean is that even when a state does something stupid like RomneyCare, we should respect that state’s right to conduct a failing experiment for all to see. After all, the federal government has specific, enumerated powers and for everything else, it’s up to the states. Likewise, when states like ours and California legalize pot for medical use, we need to respect the experiment. Now I’m not saying that we can’t criticize a state’s experiment or that states don’t have bad ideas. Lord knows I’ve criticized Romney and his socialized medicine experiment ad nauseam. What it does mean is that we must fight on behalf of the state against federal overreach. We must take a stand for limited and enumerated powers at the federal level. Otherwise, the feds just have a blank check.

We conservatives make the case day in and day out that the feds are constantly overstepping their bounds. One way in which they do that is precisely this case – trampling on states that exercise their 10th amendment rights. In most cases we fight back in unison. But in cases where we don’t like the state law or don’t agree with the policy, many on our side fail to speak up on behalf of the state. Take for instance medical marijuana. Like it or not, our state can and has made medical pot legal. Whether you agree with that or not only makes a difference in your criticism of our STATE law. It should have no bearing on whether you stand up for Colorado against the feds.

Take a look at this: Our Colorado delegation voted recently on whether to continue funding the federal government’s war against the legal medical pot industries in states like ours. A principled defender of the 10th Amendment would vote against funding federal encroachment on state affairs. Unfortunately, our Colorado Republican delegation all voted FOR funding the federal war (Colorado dems voted against). Medical pot advocates have rightly pointed out the Republican hypocrisy regarding their “love” for the 10th Amendment as simply “selective.” I could not agree more. It is selective.

It’s very simple folks: the 10th Amendment applies universally – even for state laws you don’t like. Go ahead and criticize state laws if they are bad. But please stand up for our state when the feds decide that their prerogative reigns supreme over our state law when we have jurisdiction. The states created the federal government, not the other way around.

Original Post: Jon Caldara » PPC

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