RPS + Renewables Bad

Renewables DA
1NC
Renewables DA: Renewables future is literally impossible because we don’t have
enough metal—also adds to warming through rare earth mining, acid drainage,
biofuel “clean energy” plans, and the fossil fuels to mine them. Turns case
Morningstar, independent investigative journalist, 16 (Cory Morningstar, independent
investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global
ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex,
“ENVIRONMENTALISM IS DEAD – WELCOME TO THE AGE OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM
[MCKIBBEN’S DIVESTMENT TOUR – BROUGHT TO YOU BY WALL STREET: PART XIV OF
AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORT]”
All non-ambient energy creates pollution and destruction, including renewables which are carbon based
and dependent on carbon resources from cradle to grave – coupled with built-in obsolescence by
design. Even when small or local in scale, renewable energy aids and abets growth, accelerates global
warming, and contributes to further ecological destruction. Further ecological damage is caused by rare
earth mining, as well as the acid drainage type mining for the necessary materials and special metals
such as copper and lead. Added to this ecological devastation are the fossil fuels required/used for the
mining and manufacturing of the renewable products and infrastructure. After the manufacturing they
are transported using large-scale industrial equipment also dependent on crude. Finally, all these same
resources are non-renewable. These very inconvenient facts are ignored. In a perfect world, in another
time, perhaps renewable energies will be made of butterfly kisses and rare, precious Earth minerals will
fall from the sky. University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has calculated that “the
batteries required to store this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during
cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may
exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown. If you count only the lead that we’ve actually
discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project. The
number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in
the research phase.” [Source] To not consider renewable energy infrastructures, global in scale, as
equally contributing to growth, ecological destruction and climate change is willful [ignorance]
blindness. Such willful [ignorance] blindness is sought after and fervently embraced by the same 1% of
the population that creates 50% of all global greenhouse gas emissions today. Considering the
magnitude of the task before us, it is little wonder we prefer stories, in which we write the script with a
storyline of our liking. Our frail egos do not accept there are consequences to having plundered our planet in which the outcome will be
dictated by nature. “Debord wrote that “the society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or
superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist.” Perhaps he could have spoken similarly about
modern energy or modern environmentalism. Debord’s spectacle is a divine deity around which duty-
bound citizens gravitate to chant objectives without reflecting upon fundamental goals. It’s all too easy
for us to miss the limitations of alternative energy, Debord might say, as we drop to our knees at the
foot of the clean energy spectacle, gasping in rapture. This oracle delivers a ready-made creed of ideals
and objectives that are convenient to recite and that bear the authority of science. These handy notions
of clean energy reflexively work into environmental discourse. And as we have seen here, productivist
environmentalists enroll media to tattoo wind, solar and biofuels into the subcutaneous flesh of the
environmental movement. In fact, these novelties come to define what it means to be an
environmentalist. And environmentalist’s aren’t the only ones lining up for ink.” — Conjuring Clean Energy:
Exposing Green Assumptions in Media and Academia Through the Lens of Deception – Burning Trees & Injecting C02 into Seas Divesting
from fossil fuels and investing into a “clean economy” (for the wealthy) is predicated on market
solutions. One such example is the pursuit of “clean coal”, which translates into the illusory carbon
capture and storage technology and therefore ultimately translates into business as usual. The
terminology “green energy” is equated with environmental stewardship and sustainability. Yet, behind
closed doors, a large proportion of what corporations and states constitute as society’s perception of
“green” energy is all but lost. A green energy plan or portfolio, as viewed by industry, investors, states,
etc. is predominantly comprised of biomass and bio-fuel—by far two of the most damaging sources of
energy. Yet under the guise of “clean energy” and the “new economy”, plans to expand these two
deadly sources of energy continue to proliferate with the International Energy Agency (IEA) expecting a
five-fold increase in wood-burning power plants and a threefold increase in biofuels by 2035. Another
form of “clean energy” already taking place, unbeknownst to most all global citizens is the injection of
CO2 into the ocean. Industry is already injecting CO2 on an industrial scale in the sandstone, in the
North Sea and also in the Bering Sea in greater water depths. [Source]
False Solutions DA: The aff is part of the farce of corporate environmentalism that
enables warming and the status quo through a veneer of attractive false solutions like
the aff—only the alt has a chance at solving
Prologue: A Coup d’état of Nature – Led by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex It is somewhat ironic that anti-REDD climate
activists, faux green organizations (in contrast to legitimate grassroots organizations that do exist, although few and far between)
and self-proclaimed environmentalists, who consider themselves progressive will speak out against the
commodification of nature’s natural resources while simultaneously promoting the toothless divestment
campaign promoted by the useless mainstream groups allegedly on the left. It’s ironic because the
divestment campaign will result (succeed) in a colossal injection of money shifting over to the very
portfolios heavily invested in, thus dependent upon, the intense commodification and privatization of
Earth’s last remaining forests, (via REDD, environmental “markets” and the like). This tour de force will be executed
with cunning precision under the guise of environmental stewardship and “internalizing negative
externalities through appropriate pricing.” Thus, ironically (if in appearances only), the greatest surge in the
ultimate corporate capture of Earth’s final remaining resources is being led, and will be accomplished,
by the very environmentalists and environmental groups that claim to oppose such corporate
domination and capture. Beyond shelling out billions of tax-exempt dollars (i.e., investments) to those institutions most
accommodating in the non-profit industrial complex (otherwise known as foundations), the corporations need not lift a finger to
sell this pseudo green agenda to the people in the environmental movement; the feat is being carried
out by a tag team comprised of the legitimate and the faux environmentalists. As the public is wholly
ignorant and gullible, it almost has no comprehension of the following: the magnitude of our ecological
crisis the root causes of the planetary crisis, or the non-profit industrial complex as an instrument of
hegemony. The commodification of the commons will represent the greatest, and most cunning, coup
d’état in the history of corporate dominance – an extraordinary fait accompli of unparalleled scale, with unimaginable
repercussions for humanity and all life. Further, it matters little whether or not the money is moved from direct
investments in fossil fuel corporations to so-called “socially responsible investments.” The fact of the matter is
that all corporations on the planet (and therefore by extension, all investments on the planet) are dependent upon and
will continue to require massive amounts of fossil fuels to continue to grow and expand ad infinitum – as
required by the industrialized capitalist economic system. The windmills and solar panels serve as
beautiful (marketing) imagery and a panacea for our energy issues, yet they are illusory – the fake
veneer for the commodification of the commons, which is the fundamental objective of Wall Street, the
very advisers of the divestment campaign. Thus we find ourselves unwilling to acknowledge the
necessity to dismantle the industrialized capitalist economic system, choosing instead to embrace an
illusion designed by corporate power.
Solar and Wind energy are intermittent energy sources that require fossel fuel backups,
generating more pollution in the short-term.
Ralph Vartabedian, 12-9-2012, "Renewable energy increase will require use of more fossil fuels,"
latimes, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/09/local/la-me-unreliable-power-20121210
The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full
bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to
the California grid. On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many
others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the
midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of
electricity. As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar
energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy
Center. One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared
to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired
generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to
produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from
fossil fuel plants. The public hears solar is free, wind is free," said Mitchell Weinberg, director of
strategic development for Calpine Corp., which owns Delta Energy Center. "But it is a lot more
complicated than that." Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power
they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops
blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains. In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity —
the output of a nuclear reactor — can disappear and threaten stability of the grid. To avoid that
calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires
turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing much electricity until complex data networks detect
a sudden drop in the output of renewables. Then, computerized switches are thrown and the turbines
roar to life, delivering power just in time to avoid potential blackouts. The state's electricity system can
handle the fluctuations from existing renewable output, but by 2020 vast wind and solar complexes will
sprawl across the state, and the problem will become more severe. Just how much added capacity will
be needed from traditional sources is the subject of heated debate by utility officials, government
regulators and policy experts. The concerns are expected to come to a head next year when the state
must adopt a 10-year plan for its energy needs. "This issue is someplace between a significant concern
and a major problem," said electricity system expert Severin Borenstein, a professor at UC Berkeley's
Haas School of Business. "There is definitely going to be a need for more reserves." Borenstein said
state legislators and the governor did not consider all of the details, such as unleashing this new demand
for fossil fuel generators, when they set the 33% mandate for renewable energy. The state now gets
20% of its power from renewables, in part from older hydro and geothermal energy. Gov. Jerry Brown
has advocated upping the goal to 40%. The cost to consumers in the years ahead could be in the billions
of dollars, according to industry experts. California's electricity prices are already among the highest in
the nation and are projected to rise sharply in coming years. At the moment, the need for reserve power
isn't considered a cost of renewable power, though consumers have to bear its costs as well. The
California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit company that runs the grid, estimates that by
2020 the state will need to double its reserve capacity. California now maintains a margin of 7% to 8%
above projected daily demand, in case a nuclear power plant goes offline or outages occur. But when
33% of the state's power comes from renewables, that margin will have to rise to 15%, said Stephen
Berberich, the firm's chief executive. Nobody knows whether Berberich's estimate is right or how much
the added capacity will cost. The California Energy Commission, which has responsibility for licensing
new power plants and forecasting future power demand, said it doesn't have the analytical tools
necessary to know how much reserve power will be needed. "It is frankly in the development stage,"
said Mike Jaske, the commission's senior policy analyst for electricity supply. The independent system
operator is warning that by 2017 the state will be short by about 3,100 megawatts of flexible power that
it can dedicate to meeting reserve needs — about what three nuclear reactors produce. The company is
pushing the state Public Utility Commission to require that capacity. The commission has been
noncommittal so far. Solar and wind advocates reject those concerns. They say renewables can provide
their own reserve cushion because solar and wind generators will be spread across vast areas of the
state. If wind power is down in one region, it might be up in another. If wind power is down statewide,
desert sunshine might boost solar. On the day last month when wind energy provided just 33
megawatts of power statewide, a brilliant sun spiked solar plant output. The independent system
operator "likes to show these frightening graphs for shock value," said Nancy Rader, executive director
of the California Wind Energy Assn. Edward Randolph, director of the Public Utility Commission's energy
division, said the independent system operator understandably wants more reserves because its
primary focus is on the reliability of the system. The PUC is focused on cost. If there is an immediate
problem with reserves, the PUC can order utilities to make more available. And in three to five years,
batteries, flywheels or other new technology can provide storage that would make reserves much less
necessary, he said.
The global financialization of nature, although being carried out under the imprimatur
of environmental friendliness, is only going on because the global elite needs new
markets to keep their power
One would be naïve to believe that there was not (and continues to be) an intense amount of
coordination and concerted effort functioning behind the scenes. A unification of all players woven
within the non-profit industrial complex, united in one strategic purpose: To expand, further capture
and create new capital markets, with a supportive public under the guise of a “new economy” to which
the divestment plays a pivotal role. [Here it must be noted that the media circus surrounding the Peoples Climate March
effectively eclipsed the first UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples which took place on September 22-23, 2014, planned years in
advance.] Although it is comforting to most (for reasons difficult to comprehend) that the now global climate marches appear to be led by
Rockefeller’s multi-million “scruffy little outfit” 350.org [1], the NGO at the helm of all these machinations is still Global Call for Climate Action
(TckTckTck) – an NGO with a slightly damaged patina – damage extensive enough that they obscure their clout from the glare of
the public spectacle. This is a simple sleight of hand considering 350.org is a founding partner of GCCA. “GCCA worked behind the scenes for
over a year to prepare for the biggest date in 2014, leveraging every possible asset and contact to rally around the historic Peoples’ Climate
March in the run-up to the UN Climate Leaders Summit…. In the preceding months, GCCA convened weekly calls with key partners 350.org,
Avaaz, USCAN and Climate Nexus to catalyse activities and identify gaps…. Everything came together on the day as we bore witness to the
world’s biggest ever climate march, and inspiring events across the globe, with world leaders, business people, activists, parents and artists
walking shoulder-to-shoulder.” — GCCA Annual Report 2014 GCCA, an initiative that began in Bali (2007) with a $300,000 funding commitment
from the Quebec government, is a “coalition of twenty key international organizations” including Avaaz, 350.org, Greenpeace , Kofi Annan’s
Global Humanitarian Forum, OXFAM, WWF, World Council of Churches, Union of Concerned Scientists, Equiterre, Global Call to Action against
Poverty (also co-chaired by Kumi Naidoo), and the Pew Environment Group. [Source] +++ On February 19, 2015, the co-opted CJN!
listserv shared a communiqué in regard to the divestment campaign with the following subject line:“Fossil fuel divestment seems to frighten
London financial bourgeoisie.” This “observation” amounts to willful blindness at its best. The first question to ask of any campaign is this: What
do the oligarchs wish to gain via the financing of this campaign? Aside from the shaping, managing and over-
seeing/controlling of (and even the creation of) “movements” – while simultaneously possessing the ability to effectively
enforce self-censorship via what amounts to an unspoken, agreed upon alibi – oligarchs are primarily interested in not only
maintaining power, but also expanding it. (A quick glimpse into the demise of real movements since foundation funding started
flowing like the River Nile in the sixties confirms this to be true, with a prime example being the funding used to counteract
and destroy the powerful and revolutionary Black Power movement while using its largess to
appropriate any remaining shards after its demise.) The capitalist’s way to expand power is via the pursuit, expansion and
capture of capital, furthering profits and market share. Thus, when we ask what oligarchs wish to gain via the financing of
particular campaigns, one must always consider not only how the campaign could/will affect capital but
also the ideologies surrounding capital. Using the Keystone XL (KXL) campaign as an example, the billionaire Warren Buffett
(financial advisor and close confidant to Barack Obama) legally funneled over 26 million dollars (as of 2011) into the Tides
foundation. In turn, Tides doled out the money to NGOs that would campaign against the tar sands
pipelines, including the KXL, which became the focal point of not only all tar sands campaigns, but the
primary focal point of the “environmental movement” in North America. Hence, while all eyes were on a
single pipeline (KXL) for years, Buffet built a billion dollar rail dynasty with zero dissent. Today, more oil
is being produced in North America than ever before. In 2013, rail delivered 407,761 carloads of crude
(approx. 300 million barrels of oil). This amounts to more than a 4,000% increase from 9,500 carloads in 2008.
[Source: The Association of American Railroads.] No one blinked an eye when on July 6, 2013 a train carrying Bakken
Formation crude annihilated downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec killing 47, 5 of whom were literally
vapourized. Many more environmental disasters and explosions due to crude-via-rail derailments would
follow, as would more deaths. Both framing and language is paramount in the social engineering of a global populace. Consider the
media headlines for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Divestment announcement that strategically coincided with the aforementioned
“People’s Climate March” and the United Nations climate summit that followed in NYC on September 23, 2014. The
words
“Rockefellers”, “divest”, “$860 million”, and “$50 billion” flooded the media and social networks. The
rash of announcements were met with admiration by many. Yet upon closer inspection, the RBF (the
smaller Rockefeller foundation founded in 1940) divested a portion (7%) of its 860 million-dollar fund,
which is the equivalent of $60 million (within a 5-year period). The “50 billion” repeatedly cited was a
reference to the multiple “philanthropies and high-wealth individuals” which/whom together owned
$50 billion in assets and had pledged to divest from fossil fuels over five years “using a variety of
approaches” since the campaign was launched in 2011 – with the RBF comprising part of the 50-group
coalition (Global Divest-Invest Coalition) who made the announcement. One question which does not
arise is this: why are “philanthropies and high-wealth individuals” (including 650 individuals and 180
institutions) who/which hoard/control/own $50 billion dollars, tolerated by society at all? Considering
the divestment campaign sells itself as a “moral” issue, it is revealing that the ethics behind so few
people controlling so much monetary wealth never comes into question. In 2014, global fossil fuel assets (oil, gas
and coal) were valued at approx. $US 5-trillion. In comparison, assets belonging to RockefellerBrothers Fund amount to approximately $US 860-
million while the Rockefeller Foundation (founded in 1913) has assets of approximately $$US 4.2-billion (2014). And although
the
divestment campaign boasts that hundreds of institutions, local governments and individuals, (which
represents over $US 50-billion in assets as of September 2014) have pledged to divest from fossil fuels, one must note
that the Rockefeller Foundation— has shown no such desire. Nor have other powerful
institutions/foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (with $US 9-billion in assets) or the David & Lucile Packard
Foundation (with $US 7-billion in assets). The heirs of the Rockefeller Family Fund (founded in 1967) maintain ties to the
RFB. They also retained their personal stock in Exxon Mobil which made gains in 2014 of approx. 11%.
While many believed that Exxon’s rejection of divestment was based upon fear of big money moving
against it (i.e. “stranded assets“) – the Rockefeller Foundation and the RFF’s decision to hold onto their
Exxon shares (along with the Rockefeller heirs) demonstrated that this premise was largely false. Fast
forward to 2015. How quickly things can change. November 13, 2015, Bloomberg: “OPEC reports the biggest oil glut in a decade.” As oil prices
drop, demand/consumption continues to climb (globally by 1.8 million barrels per day to 94.6 million in 2015), while growth for the world
economy continues to stand still. On October 1, 2015 it was reported that the according to the International Energy Agency, global oil demand
was climbing at the fastest rate in five years. By December 2, 2016, committed pledges to divest from fossil fuels would reach $3.4 trillion.
Floating oilstorage (tankers), rolling oil storage (rail cars) and oil storage terminals became sought after
commodities. On December 2, 2015, Bloomberg reported that the US is ploughing billions into infrastructure (with
the various projects well underway) to pump the oil back underground into massive salt calverns, as well
as additional storage facilities/terminals. Each calvern will hold 3.5 million barrels of oil. Why? Not
because of the divestment campaign, but rather because of a rare occurrence with a far greater
significance. The global economy has become stagnant. Capitalism has reached it’s limits. And under the
capitalist economic system, if the economy does not grow, it will collapse. Hence the need for new
markets. Hence the need for a third industrial revolution. Hence the need for the global financialization
of nature.
The Green Capitalism of the affirmative inevitably fails. It does nothing to challenge
the power of those who emit the most carbon dioxide and will result in an
authoritarian state where wages constantly decline in an effort to pay for the new
measures—turning the aff
Hans A. Baer, a scholar activist who adheres to the notion of praxis – the merger of theory and social
action – anthropologist, “Global Capitalism and Climate Change,” in Handbook on International Political
Economy, edited by Ralph Pettman, World Scientific Publishing Company: Singapore, 2012, pg. 395-
414, http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43030594/Ralph_Pettman-
Handbook_On_International_Political_Economy-
Wo1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1469152351&Signature=2QfxTk1NR8qz
Xt2JG1EBkkXVV18%3D&response-content-
disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRalph_Pettman_Handbook_On_International.pdf#page=408, KD
Many of the specific proposals, albeit not all of them, would be steps toward mitigation. While
numerous strategies, including emissions trading schemes, emissions taxes, and carbon capture
sequestration, have been proposed as ways of coping with climate change, the vast majority of them are
framed within the existing parameters of global capitalism, either under the dictates of climate regimes,
such as the Kyoto Protocol and the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), or under the rubric of ‘green
capitalism’. As such they will be insufficient to contain climate change in the long run. Mueller and
Passadakis (2010, pp. 562–564) delineate eight arguments against green capitalism. In the interests of
space, only the first four will be considered here: • Green capitalism will not challenge the power of
those who actually produce most greenhouse gases. • All types of green capitalism fail to acknowledge
that the expansive nature of capitalism — its need to grow — will undermine any attempt to reduce its
constant imperial demand for more resources. • [I]n a green capitalist setup, wages will probably
stagnate or even decline, to offset the rising costs of ‘ecological modernisation’. • The ‘green capitalist
state’ will be an authoritarian one. Ultimately, Mueller and Passadakis (2010, p. 563) insist that
governments and corporations will not provide adequate solutions to the climate crisis but rather that
solutions will have to emerge from “globally networked social movements for climate justice” around
the world.
CO2 reductions have fueled the natural gas industry and led to a net-increase in GHG
emissions through methane. Methane is 100 times more potent
McKibben 16 (Bill McKibben, 3/23/16, scholar in residence at Middlebury College,
https://www.thenation.com/article/global-warming-terrifying-new-chemistry/)
Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent
interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If
you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how
many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really
wrong. There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk
about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon
reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet
methane, otherwise known as CH4. In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research
Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities.
Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30
percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s
atmosphere. To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2 . Partly as
a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that
burn natural gas , which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than
burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But
this new Harvard data,
which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new
natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And
molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than
carbon dioxide. The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2.
But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is
the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program
has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000. These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large
share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change. In fact, it’s even possible
that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is
utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the
promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread. The Obama administration,
to its credit, seems to be waking up to the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane calculations, and in early March, the
United States reached an agreement with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks from all that new gas infrastructure.
But none of this gets to the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is driving
the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously. To
understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists
included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was
most visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where, by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening
every week. The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing
faster than ever, and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming. So
lots of people thought it was great news when
natural-gas wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade. Fracking involves exploding
the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought
online new shale deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale, stretching from West Virginia up into
Pennsylvania and New York. The quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast that they were measured in trillions of
cubic feet and in centuries of supply. The
apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it releases
half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as
bad for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-
win situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant yammering about climate
change without having to run up the cost of electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the
equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair. It’s possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased
during the Obama years. And it appeared even better than that. If you were President Obama and had inherited a dead-in-the-
water economy, the fracking boom offered one of the few economic bright spots. Not only did it employ lots of
people, but cheap natural gas had also begun to alter the country’s economic equation: Manufacturing jobs were
actually returning from overseas, attracted by newly abundant energy . In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama
declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his
2014 address, he announced that “businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,” and pledged to “cut red tape”
to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal
palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he
said in 2012, “helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that
government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.” Obama had plenty of help
selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous
credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to
the “revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our
dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Meanwhile, the longtime executive director
of the Sierra Club,
Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his
organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, “an
excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted .” (That CEO, Aubrey
McClendon, apparently killed himself earlier this month, crashing his car into a bridge embankment days after being indicted for bid-rigging.)
Exxon was in apparent agreement as well: It purchased XTO Energy, becoming the biggest fracker in the world overnight and allowing the
company to make the claim that it was helping to drive emissions down. For a brief shining moment, you couldn’t have asked for more. As
Obama told a joint session of Congress, “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and
cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.” Unless, of course, you happened to
live in the fracking zone, where nightmares were starting to unfold. In recent decades, most American oil and
gas exploration had been concentrated in the western United States, often far from population centers. When
there were problems, politicians and media in these states paid little attention. The Marcellus Shale, though, underlies densely populated
eastern states. It wasn’t long before stories about the pollution of farm fields and contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals
began to make their way into the national media. In the Delaware Valley, after a fracking company tried to lease his family’s farm, a young
filmmaker named Josh Fox produced one of the classic environmental documentaries of all time, Gasland, which became instantly famous for
its shot of a man lighting on fire the methane flowing from his water faucet. This reporting helped galvanize a movement—at first town by
town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the
Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced
Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking:
The Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations
from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. “The club needs to…advocate more fiercely
to use as little gas as possible,” he said. “We’re not going to mute our voice on this.” As for Robert Kennnedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling
natural gas a “catastrophe.” In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the
attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got
interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they
decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these
fracking operations? Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation. Because here’s the
unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if
you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its
route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently
than CO 2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—
maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates
could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into
the atmosphere. To
say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two
scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the “Ivory Tower’s
latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration.” Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had
just finished an industry-funded report that found “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable”; one of
its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as “very weak.” One of its other authors,
Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he
lauded the “stunning increase” in natural gas as a “revolution” and pledged to increase its use
domestically. The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013,
for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. “We were expecting to see high
methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see,” said the study’s director. But such
work was always piecemeal, one area at a time, while other studies—often conducted with industry-supplied data—came up with lower
numbers. That’s why last month’s Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a
decade to demonstrate that US
methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been
insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong—
on a massive scale. In fact, emissions “are substantially higher than we’ve understood,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in
early March. The Harvard study wasn’t designed to show why US methane emissions were growing—in other parts of the world, as new
research makes clear, cattle and wetlands seem to be causing emissions to accelerate. But the spike that the satellites recorded coincided
almost perfectly with the era when fracking went big-time. To make matters worse, during the same decade, experts had become steadily more
worried about the effects of methane in any quantity on the atmosphere. Everyone agrees that, molecule for molecule, methane traps far more
heat than CO2—but exactly how much wasn’t clear. One reason the EPA estimates of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions showed such
improvement was because the agency, following standard procedures, was assigning a low value to methane and
measuring its impact over a 100-year period. But a methane molecule lasts only a couple of decades in the air, compared with
centuries for CO2. That’s good news, in that methane’s effects are transient—and very bad news because that transient but intense effect
happens right now, when we’re breaking the back of the planet’s climate. The EPA’s old chemistry and 100-year time frame
assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure, says
Howarth, is between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two. If you combine
Howarth’s estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America’s
total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the
EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and
sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things
have gotten worse. Since Howarth is an outspoken opponent of fracking, I ran the Harvard data past an impeccably moderate referee, the
venerable climate-policy wonk Dan Lashof. A UC Berkeley PhD who has been in the inner circles of climate policy almost since it began, Lashof
has helped write reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and craft the Obama administration’s plan to cut coal-plant
pollution. The longtime head of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he is now the chief operations officer of
billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate America. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten
worse. “The Harvard paper is important,” Lashof said. “It’s the most convincing new data I have seen showing that the EPA’s estimates of the
methane-leak rate are much too low. I think this paper shows that US greenhouse-gas emissions may have gone
up over the last decade if you focus on the combined short-term-warming impact.” Under the worst-case
scenario—one that assumes that methane is extremely potent and extremely fast-acting—the United States has actually slightly increased its
greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 to 2015. That’s the chart below: the blue line shows what we’ve been telling ourselves and the world
about our emissions—that they are falling. The red line, the worst-case calculation from the new numbers, shows just the opposite. Lashof
argues for a more moderate reading of the numbers (calculating methane’s impact over 50 years, for instance). But even this estimate—one
that attributes less of the methane release to fracking—wipes out as much as three-fifths of the
greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming. This more modest reassessment is the yellow
line in the chart below; it shows the country reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, but by nowhere near as much as we had thought. The lines
are doubtless not as smooth as the charts imply, and other studies will provide more detail and perhaps shift the calculations. But any reading
of the new data offers a very different version of our recent history.
Among other things, either case undercuts the
statistics that America used to negotiate the Paris climate accord. It’s more upsetting than the discovery
last year that China had underestimated its coal use, because China now appears to be cutting back
aggressively on coal. If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to
meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.
Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane
is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks.
Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small
compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with
fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a
couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider
the cement seals around drill pipes, says
Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make
a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical
problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.” With that in mind,
the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with
optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking. “It ought to be simple
to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’” —Naomi Oreskes And if we didn’t frack,
what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over
the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps,
which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can
generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five
years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a
realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month). One
of the
nastiest side effects of the fracking boom, in fact, is that the expansion of natural gas has undercut the
market for renewables, keeping us from putting up windmills and solar panels at the necessary pace. Joe
Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else.
Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level
emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean
power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future
cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting
greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating
reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to
lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.” There was one oddly reassuring number in the Harvard
satellite data: The massive new surge of methane from the United States constituted somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the global
growth in methane emissions this past decade. In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet’s surface known as the United
States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world. Another way of saying this is: We were the first
to figure out how to frack. In this new century, we’re leading the world into the natural-gas age, just as we poured far more carbon into the
20th-century atmosphere than any other nation. So, thank God, now that we know there’s a problem, we could warn the rest of the planet
before it goes down the same path. Except we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a
key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set
up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was
soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that
the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms
of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.
Solar disposal causes e-waste exports –

Expanding the solar industry causes e-waste dumping---turns the whole case
ISHAN NATH, Rhodes scholar and Stanford graduate – major in economics and Earth Systems and
minor in mathematics, 10 [“Cleaning Up After Clean Energy: Hazardous Waste in the Solar Industry,”
Stanford Journal of International Affairs, Volume 11, number 2,
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/pdf/Solar_11.2.pdf]
These hopes for a viable source of renewable ¶ energy, however, have recently been tempered with a ¶ word of caution. Toxic waste,
experts say, is something ¶ the solar industry must watch out for, as detailed by ¶ the watchdog nonprofit Silicon Valley
Toxics Coalition ¶ (SVTC) in a widely circulated new report. Essentially, ¶ solar firms face two dilemmas concerning their ¶ hazardous chemicals.
How can the production process ¶ ensure that panels are manufactured without leaking ¶ waste and how
will they be disposed of after a lifetime ¶ of use? These concerns, though fairly manageable in ¶ and of themselves,
exist in a complex international ¶ web of competing political, economic, and scientific ¶ interests. Given this
complexity, most solar firms ¶ have focused on the more straightforward of the two ¶ problems: end-of-life recycling. But in creating a fairly ¶
solid foundation for addressing this issue, the industry ¶ has largely overlooked investigative reports revealing ¶ current problems with
production waste, particularly ¶ pertaining to Chinese manufacturing. Until
these ¶ concerns receive more attention,
promises of panel ¶ recycling will quell any public anxiety, preventing the ¶ creation of necessary
safeguards to stop rogue firms ¶ from unsafe manufacturing practices. To fully address ¶ its hazardous waste issues,
the solar industry must move ¶ forward aggressively not only with its development of ¶ panel recycling programs, but also with steps to address
¶ more pressing issues in the production process.¶ The first question facing solar firms is how to ¶ address the prospect of used panels
inundating landfills ¶ and leaching toxic waste into the environment. When
a solar module outlives its usefulness 20 to 25
¶
years ¶ after installation, its disposal must be carefully handled ¶ to avoid contamination from the
enclosed chemicals. ¶ But, given examples from similar industries, there is no ¶ guarantee that this procedure will take place. More
than ¶ two-thirds of American states have no existing laws ¶ requiring electronics recycling and the US
currently ¶ exports 80 percent of its electronic waste (e-waste) ¶ to developing countries that lack infrastructure to ¶ manage
it.¶ 1¶ Thus, by urging solar companies to plan ¶ for proper disposal of decommissioned panels, SVTC ¶ draws attention to an issue that
currently remains ¶ unaddressed. The Coalition makes an appeal for ¶ legislation requiring Extended Producer Responsibility, ¶ which would
force firms to take back and recycle their ¶ used products, but in the absence of such requirements, ¶ is the solar industry ready for the
eventual onrush of ¶ solar panels?¶ 2¶ “I don’t think enough people are thinking ¶ about [recycling used solar panels],” said Jamie Porges, ¶ COO
and Founder of Radiance Solar, an Atlantabased startup. “I’m sure there are people who have ¶ thought about it, but I don’t think there’s been
enough ¶ open discussion and I haven’t heard a plan.”¶ 3¶ Another ¶ executive familiar with the solar industry frames the ¶ problem more
urgently. Steve Newcomb, Founder and ¶ CEO of “One Block Off the Grid,” a firm that connects ¶ consumers with the solar industry, calls the
issue of ¶ used solar modules “a big deal, and one that nobody’s ¶ thought a lot about yet.” If nothing is
done, he warns, ¶ the situation could escalate into “a major disaster.”¶ 4
2NC
REM Recycling is difficult, may produce greater environmental harms, and the supply
of ready-to-recycle electronics is too low for demand
Jessica Marshall, 4-7-2014, "Why Rare Earth Recycling Is Rare (And What We Can Do About It)," Ensia,
https://ensia.com/features/why-rare-earth-recycling-is-rare-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/
As recently as 2010, China

produced about 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth elements. That year
the country decided to limit exports, which drove prices through the roof. “Prices of some rare earths rose by 2,000
percent and more,” says Jim Sims of rare earth mining company Molycorp, which recently reopened a shuttered rare earth mine in California.
Rare earth element prices have since dropped and are now much less volatile — thanks in part to the opening or reopening of Molycorp mines
and others around the world. Still, burned by this experience, corporations and countries are working to ensure themselves a sufficient stream
of rare earths however they can. One option being explored is recycling rare earth metals from used products. You might
think it
would be easier to recover rare earths from products than extract them from the ground, but it’s not as
easy as it sounds. Given the importance of these products to modern living, governments around the world are funding research to
make recycling a more feasible option. Some companies are already finding it worthwhile. Not Curbside Recycling rare earth elements isn’t as
easy as recycling glass or plastic — there are challenges at nearly every level. For one thing, the elements
are present in small
amounts in things like cell phones. As parts get smaller, so do the amounts of material used. In a touch
screen, for example, the elements are distributed throughout the material at the molecular scale. “It’s
actually getting much harder to recycle electronics,” says Alex King of the Ames Lab in Ames, Iowa, and director of the
Critical Materials Institute — a U.S. Department of Energy–funded “Innovation Hub” focused on strategies for ensuring the supply of five rare
earth metals identified by the government as critical. “We
used to have cell phones where you could snap out the
battery, which is probably the biggest single target for recycling. With smartphones, those things are
built so you can’t get the battery out, at least not easily.” Cell phones are typically recycled by smashing, shredding and
grinding them into powder. The powder can then be separated into component materials for disposal or recycling. But new cell phones
incorporate more elements than ever — some around 65 in total. (For comparison, all of industry uses only about 85
different elements.) This makes the powder a more complicated mixture to separate than it was with older
phones. “It’s easier to separate rare earth elements from rocks than from cell phones,” King says. To
separate these materials often means “very aggressive solvents or very high temperature molten metal processing. It’s not simple,” says Yale
University industrial ecologist Thomas Graedel. Because of the nasty materials or large amounts of energy needed, in
some cases recycling could create greater environmental harm than mining for the metals in the first
place. “A case by case analysis is needed to decide whether a given product is a good recycling candidate,” Graedel says. One recent study
calculated the complete energy and environmental impacts of producing a kilogram of the rare earth metal neodymium for magnets by
recycling computer hard drives versus mining the same amount of virgin material. In
the case considered, recycling had a
human toxicity score more than 80 percent lower than mining and used almost 60 percent less energy.
However, Graedel notes, “this example recovers neodymium in the alloy form used in magnets.” Applications such as use as a
glass colorant would require that it be reduced back to elemental form, which would take more
resources. The researchers, led by Benjamin Sprecher at the Materials Innovation Institute in Delft, Netherlands, also found that shredding
hard drives for recycling resulted in a 90 percent loss of neodymium. “The large losses of material incurred while shredding the material puts
serious doubts on the usefulness of this type of recycling as a solution for scarcity,” the researchers wrote. They propose a method in which
hard drives are taken apart by hand as a way to address this issue. When small amounts of rare earths are part of complex mixtures, separation
can be too expensive to justify for these elements alone, leading some to suggest that the even more valuable elements within electronics, such
as gold, palladium and iridium, may make recycling economically worthwhile. “It might be that the rare earths will pay for the price of doing the
processing and the gold, platinum and palladium will be the cash flow,” says Eric Peterson of Idaho National Laboratory, who leads the rare
earth reuse and recycling research program for the Critical Materials Institute. To address both environmental and economic problems with
recycling, the Critical Materials Institute and other research groups, including a European consortium, are testing supercritical carbon dioxide,
ionic liquids, electrochemical methods and more as strategies for improving the prospects of rare earth recycling. Getting the Goods While the
technical challenges of recycling rare earths are substantial, Graedel says, they are not the main problem. “I think it’s fair to say that the
biggest challenge we have with recycling the rare earths and many other things is the challenge of
collection,” he says. “It’s more of a social and perhaps regulatory challenge than a technological
challenge.” The existing recycling infrastructure for fluorescent bulbs makes them good candidates for rare earth recycling, many experts
say.With price pressures off, at least for now, and few laws requiring recycling, there is little incentive to try to get the materials back. As of
2011, less than 1 percent of rare earths were recycled. People tend to hoard or toss their old phones. Cars,
which may have more
than two dozen rare-earth-containing motors in them driving everything from windshield wipers to the
rear view mirror adjustment, are not recovered formally. Many electronics end up in developing
countries where they may ultimately be dismantled in unsafe or inefficient ways. And even fluorescent
light bulbs, which are supposed to be recycled by law because of the mercury in the tubes, are only recycled at a rate of around
30 to 35 percent. The existing recycling infrastructure for fluorescent bulbs makes them good candidates for rare earth recycling, many
experts say. Fluorescent light bulbs make use of rare earth elements to fill out the color spectrum: the red and green phosphors in the powder
that lines the inside of the lights are the rare earth elements europium and terbium. Recyclers collect the mercury, the glass and the metal
parts of the bulbs, but they have traditionally dumped the rare-earth-containing white powder that lines the tubes. Some companies are now
recovering these. While LED lights may be taking off in popularity, there will be plenty of fluorescent and compact fluorescent bulbs in use for
decades to come, Peterson says, so they remain good targets for recycling. LEDs use rare earths, too, but in much smaller amounts than
fluorescent bulbs and in ways that make them more difficult to recycle. “I am not convinced that it will be possible to extract rare earths from
LEDs in an economical manner,” King notes. Despite the challenges, some companies are trying to make rare earth recycling work.Another
promising area for boosting recycling of rare earths is in products that remain concentrated within industries rather than being scattered into
the hands of consumers. Cutting-edge wind turbines use rare-earth magnets in their motors; neodymium and dysprosium make super powerful
magnets that allow stronger motors and a simpler mechanical design. For offshore wind farms, maintenance is no small feat, so companies
tend to install the most reliable option — which contain hundreds of kilograms of rare earth elements. Because they contain such large
amounts — and because they are concentrated in stationary wind farms — recycling
rare earths from wind turbines is much
more feasible than recycling them from products flung far and wide. “There is a much better chance that they have a
happy second life,” Graedel says. Despite the challenges, some companies are trying to make rare earth recycling work. French chemical
company Rhodia has announced multiple rare earth recycling projects. Mitsubishi Electric reported in 2012 that it is recovering and recycling
rare earth magnets from its air conditioners, and Hitachi announced development of a magnet recovery machine for hard disk drives and air
conditioners, with the intent to bring the technology into commercial operation. Honda announced last year that it was beginning to recover
the rare earth elements from its hybrid car batteries. Supply and Demand Of
course this all assumes a big enough supply of
ready-for-recycling electronics — which may not be a safe assumption right now. Wind turbines, for example,
have a 20- to 30-year lifetime, meaning almost none is yet ready for recycling. In one recent study, Jelle Rademaker of the Green Academy in
the Netherlands and colleagues calculated the potential for rare earth recycling from magnets in computer hard drives, hybrid cars and wind
turbines, assuming 100 percent recovery in each case.
They found that the amount available for recycling could be at
most 10 to 15 percent of the demand between now and 2015. The percentage dips even further toward 2020, as
demand takes off but only computer hard drives are available for recycling. till, as cars and wind turbines reach the end of their lifetimes,
recycling by 2030 could theoretically meet more than 20 percent of demand. “In the long run, it might have a significant impact,” Rademaker
notes. Until economics, legislation or demand catches up, one idea is to save the metals, trapped in their devices, for the future. “Some
people say we should landfill it all and wait for a better technology,” says Rademaker. “That’s the idea of
urban mining. If you have the space for it and if it’s not hazardous and you can landfill it safely, keep the
metals for a moment when we do know what to do with it.”
Block Extensions
Extend Renewables DA 1NC Morningstar 16: creating renewables causes further
ecological damage through rare earth mining and acid drainage mining for the metals
to produce renewables; fossil fuels also still have to be used to create renewables in
manufacturing. And all the resources for creating renewables are non-renewable as
well. And their green economy of renewables is impossible; we have only 2% of the
lead needed for making solar/wind energy be 100% of world energy. This false future
is made to be spectacular through tales like the aff’s solvency so that people don’t
examine these inconvenient facts.
Extend 1NC Morningstar 16 False Solutions DA: Energy solutions within capitalism like
the aff serve as marketing for the commodification of the commons by elites. This
commodification then becomes backed up even by fervent environmentalists because
of the veneer of false solutions perpetuated by the aff, enabling further global
warming through the financialization of nature—turns case.
Extend 1NC Morningstar 16: global financialization of nature is carried out so that
capitalism can expand, but capitalists put up false reasons for this, embodied in
Warren Buffett investing money into anti-KXL NGO’s while then building a billion
dollar rail industry to cart oil across North America. Divestment in fossil fuels from
financial institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation is not coming either.
Capitalists preach that they are environmentally friendly while keeping policies in
place that harm the environment. Turns case because the aff carbon pricing mech is
just another distraction from the fact that capital only cares about capital.
RPS
Air Pollution
RPS increases non-CO2 pollution—SO2

Jim Rossi, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Florida State University College fo Law, “The
Limits of a National Renewable Portfolio Standard,” CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW v. 42 n. 5, 7—10, p.
1445.
Moreover, the substitution effects an RPS could encourage can undermine climate change goals if a
carbon pricing mechanism such as cap-and-trade is not also in place. Michaels also suggests that besides
being less economically efficient than a market-based system, an RPS might increase pollution by other
pollutants already subject to marketbased regulation, notably sulfur dioxide:
An RPS must also be evaluated in the context of existing environmental regulations that it will
supplement (or possibly replace). Pollutants that are under cap-and-trade regimes may be particularly
affected. If renewables reduce emissions of a capped pollutant, owners of conventional plants that
remain in operation will be able to increase theirs. Allowance prices will fall and conventional plant
owners will not need to make investments to further cut their emissions. Emissions will remain at the
cap level, but the reduction due to the renewables could have been achieved more cheaply by the
conventional generators.
National RPS will concentrate RE in high-value areas—localizes the economic benefits

and concentrates coal plants
Lynn M. Fountain, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, University of Connecticut, “Johnny-Come-Lately:
Practical Considerations of a National RPS,” CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW v. 42 n. 5, 7—10, p. 1490.
Furthermore, will a national RPS that encourages the development of new renewable energy generation
wherever it is cheaper and easier to build result in the pooling of fossil fuel plants in areas less favorable
to renewable energy? Wind and concentrated solar facilities, for instance, need large tracts of land, in
addition to good wind and/or solar access. These requirements mean that such facilities are more likely
to be built in the western portion of the United States and hundreds of miles from the nearest load
centers. Remotely located renewable energy facilities require new transmission to move the power from
the facility to the load centers. Under a federal system, who bears this cost? If it is the developer, the
costs will likely be pushed on to the off-takers of the power (i.e., the utilities and electric suppliers),
which means it will eventually be pushed down to the customers. If the federal government elects to
subsidize the construction of new transmission, query whether it is fair to spread these transmission
costs across the entire country through a federal tax, when the economic benefits are so localized.
Momentum
RPS too slow to solve--momentum

David B. Spence, Associate Professor, Law, Politics & Regulation, McCombs School of Business,
University of Texas-Austin, “The Political Barriers to a National RPS,” CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW v. 42
n. 5, 2010, p. 1469-1470.
In addition, since greenhouse gases persist in the atmosphere for fifty years after being emitted, the
benefits of action now will accrue not so much to this generation or the next, but to the ones after that.
In other words, we will not see the benefits of a national RPS in ways that are easy to measure or
understand, nor will we see them in our lifetimes. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will
continue to grow long after we have reduced our emissions. Furthermore, in the absence of emissions
reductions in China and India,74 those benefits may never be realized. Even if one accepts the sensible
rejoinder that the industrialized world ought to be the first mover on this issue because it grew to
wealth on the back of uncontrolled fossil-fueled emissions,75 the nature of the greenhouse effect is
such that emissions reductions in the United States (or Europe or anywhere) accrue to the benefit of the
entire world. This is the tragedy of the commons76 on its grandest (and, therefore, most powerful) scale
yet. While the Clean Air Act of 1970 benefited Canadians by imposing emissions controls on American
power plants,77 Congress knew then that most of the benefits would accrue to Americans.
Consequently, legislators could take credit for addressing the problem, and for any progress that could
be traced back to those statutes. As it happened, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act produced
results relatively quickly: each represents an enormous success story, having drastically reduced air and
water emissions in real terms, despite growth in population, economic activity, and vehicle miles
traveled since their passage.78 If Congress enacts a national RPS or takes other steps to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, we will not see the same sort of easily identifiable benefits. It may only be
fair to future generations and to citizens of the world for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas
emissions now, but it is very difficult for members of Congress to enact legislation, the costs of which fall
entirely on their constituents, and most of the benefits of which fall elsewhere and in the distant future.
Substitution Turn
Climate effects are limited—firm substitution effects

1432-1433.
While many of the purported benefits that would accompany a national RPS are desirable, the climate
change benefits are hardly guaranteed. A national RPS has distributional and firm behavior
consequences. These consequences could dampen some of the benefits of a national RPS, especially if it
is adopted as a stand-alone program or without more systematic reforms to environmental and energy
law. Depending on the baseline used in evaluating a national RPS, the distributional effects of an RPS
mandate (paid for through rates increases passed on to customers) are not as desirable from either a
fairness or efficiency perspective as a national subsidy financed through the federal income tax. The firm
substitutability effects of a national RPS also may not be desirable from either the perspective of
efficiency or the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
RPS leads to a shift away from NG generation—confounds climate goals

1436-1438.
An RPS mandate can also affect firm behavior and produce unintended consequences. Specifically,
mandates can have adverse substitution effects on firms in the energy industry. One criticism of
environmental regulation is that, in many instances, regulators have failed to pay attention to what Tim
Malloy refers to as “micro-market” effects.34 Such effects include resource allocation decisions by firms
(and their constituent actors) as they consider how to respond to regulation. Sometimes, the response
by firms will be consonant with other regulatory objectives, but sometimes the micro-market effects of
firms may lead to conduct that departs from the broader intended goals of a regulatory system.35 One
such effect is how a regulatory mandate may lead a firm to substitute one undesirable behavior with
another behavior that produces other social ills.
For example, consider the impact of another national regulatory mandate: ethanol requirements in
gasoline refining. The combination of subsidies and regulatory mandates for corn-based ethanol have
had the unintended effect of significantly increasing food prices as land for food crops has shifted to
growing corn for fuel.36 Such a shift in production decisions has impacted the price of food for citizens
of developing nations, contributing to the global food shortage.37 In addition, cultivation of corn for
biofuels has had other adverse environmental impacts, such as increasing the pollution runoff into the
Chesapeake Bay from increased agricultural production on surrounding farms.38
In the context of a national RPS, a regulatory mandate could also produce adverse substitution effects.
Any assessment of the effects of an RPS mandate on firms must begin by recognizing that most utilities
draw on a portfolio of power generation sources. The present portfolio of resources for most utilities is
heavily biased toward fossil fuels. The fuel mix in the current industry-wide portfolio may not be socially
desirable given concerns about energy security and climate change; at the same time, there are power
system reasons that certain resources are more desirable than others, including meeting base load
demand and responding to shortterm power peaks. In addition, utilities are only able to use certain
generation sources to the extent they have sufficient access to transmission resources to transport
them, and different generation technologies have different transmission requirements in terms of both
location and capacity. The portfolio substitution effects of an RPS mandate and transmission constraints
seriously hinder the ability of an RPS mandate to achieve its goals.
In terms of generation portfolio, an RPS mandate requires firms to allocate their financial resources to
either produce or procure electric power from sources that are significantly more costly than traditional
fossil fuels, such as coal. A utility firm is unlikely to absorb the costs of compliance with an RPS from its
own profit margins. To the extent a firm’s demand for various approaches to generating electricity is
elastic (i.e., responsive to changes in price), an RPS requirement may lead to substitution away from
more expensive forms of producing electric power and toward the firm’s least expensive options. Coal
already comprises nearly half of the generation of electric power in the United States.39 In addition,
based on the current market price of fuel, it is one of the lowest marginal cost resources for firms
seeking to generate electric power, given that there is already substantial power generation and
transportation infrastructure to support coal.40 Coal also has the largest carbon impact of fuels used in
electric power production.41
In terms of cost, natural gas, which comprises about twenty percent of electric power production
capacity,42 is typically more expensive and subject to greater market price variation than coal,43 but
natural gas also has one of the lowest carbon impacts of any fossil fuel.44 It is for this reason that many
see natural gas as playing an important role in greenhouse gas reduction and global warming
mitigation.45 For example, a Resources for the Future study concludes that “[t]he RPS tends to
encourage renewables largely at the expense of natural gas, and thus is less effective at reducing carbon
emissions than would be a direct tax on carbon emissions.”46 If an RPS leads to substitution away from
natural gas and toward coal, it will undermine any greenhouse gas reduction goal of a national RPS.
The plan displaces gas generation

1438-1439.
In addition to cost factors that might undermine the benefits of an RPS mandate for climate change
mitigation, such substitution may also produce inefficiencies in the operation of electric power
systems.47 System-wide operational factors may encourage adverse substitution away from natural gas
and other less carbon intensive sources of generating electric power. To begin, assume that a utility
plans to satisfy demand with its own power plants. If demand is not increasing, then renewables might,
at least in theory, allow the utility to retire existing plants or use them less. The operational decisions of
utility firms, however, complicate the decisionmaking process. Most utilities use computer programs to
help them decide which plants to dispatch, based primarily on cost and operational criteria. The grid
operator—whether it is a regional organization to which the utility has given operational control, or the
utility itself—typically makes decisions about what plants to dispatch on the basis of “merit order,” as
Professor Davies acknowledges.48
In general, the operator will prefer to run the plants first that are least expensive to run, taking into
account operational and reliability limitations. Since the demand for electricity is not constant across
time, utilities operate some plants all the time (to meet “base load”) and bring others onand off-line to
meet peak demand at times when customer usage of electricity is highest. Different technologies for
generating electric power, however, have “ramp rates”: some generators, such as natural gas-fired
peaking plants can be brought on-line quicker than others. A utility typically runs nuclear and coal plants
as baseload plants because they provide inexpensive power and cannot be switched on and off
quickly.49 That means that, in terms of both cost and operational considerations, new renewable
generation is most likely to displace natural gas plants that are switched on and off as needed because
they are efficient and low cost options.
That turns the advantage

1440-1441.
In sum, cost considerations affecting substitutability would suggest that if an RPS mandate is not
financed in a way that provides 100% cost recovery to firms, so as to leave a firm neutral with respect to
its resource allocation decisions, an RPS would likely create incentives for firms to substitute away from
natural gas and toward coal as a fuel source for the non-renewable portion of its generation portfolio. A
cheaper fuel source, such as coal, could help a firm to subsidize compliance with the RPS mandate. Such
substitution, however, would increase carbon emissions and thus is not consistent with the climate
change mitigation goal of the RPS. Even if cost recovery makes firms neutral regarding substitution away
from natural gas, system-wide operational considerations would likely still favor using less natural gas
for peaking purposes.
Economy—Defense
State RPS experience shows that the economic effects are modest
Lincoln L. Davies, Associate Professor, Law, University of Utah, “The Future of Energy Policy: A National
Renewable Portfolio Standard: Power Forward: The Argument for a National RPS,” CONNECTICUT LAW
REVIEW v. 42, 7—10, p. 1384.
State RPSs' economic effects appear similarly moderate. Although virtually every state that has studied
the issue has predicted added jobs and industrial output from RPS enactments, n269 research on state
RPSs' actual empirics has focused on price impacts. Those data show three trends. First, state RPSs so far
have not delivered the price decreases some analysts have projected for a federal measure. Second,
state RPSs have increased retail prices, but those increases generally have been small. Third, these price
impacts have varied rather substantially by state. For instance, a 2009 analysis by Wolf and Taran
compared twelve RPS states' retail prices with those of twenty-eight non-RPS states. The study
concluded that state RPSs caused "small" price increases-an average of two cents per kilowatt-hour-but
the "variability in prices among states [was] far greater" than the average. n270 The Lawrence Berkeley
study reached a comparable result. Estimating 2007 price impacts in twelve RPS jurisdictions, the study
found that state RPSs have caused price increases of barely 0.1% (Maryland) to just over 1%
(Connecticut and Massachusetts). n271
Economy—Offense
Federal RPS will drive up energy prices, decreases economic competitiveness and
hurting economy as a whole
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), staff, “U.S. Manufacturers and Electric Companies
Remain Firmly United Against Federal Renewable Portfolio Standard,” STATES NEWS SERVICE, 8—2—
07, lexis.
A proposal to require U.S. power companies to produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable
resources in roughly the next decade likely will cost consumers billions of dollars, with little chance of
achieving such an ambitious goal, manufacturing and utility groups said today. On the eve of an
expected House vote on a nationwide renewable portfolio standard (RPS), the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM) and Edison Electric Institute (EEI) expressed support for increasing electric
generation from renewables, but said a federal mandate was the wrong approach. "We are deeply
concerned that an RPS will lead to higher electricity prices for all types of consumers, undermining the
ability of U.S. businesses to compete in a global economy and reducing the take-home pay of American
workers," said NAM President John Engler, noting that U.S. manufacturers account for a third of the
nation's energy use and nearly 30 percent of its electricity. "Affordable and reliable electricity is
essential to the long-term health of the U.S. economy." "Everyone's in favor of renewable energy, but
this federal mandate essentially is a tax on electricity for many businesses and consumers," added EEI
President Tom Kuhn. "States already are working to increase the amount of electricity produced from
renewables. The last thing we need is for Congress to impose a preemptive federal mandate that is
neither cost-effective nor achievable nationwide."
National RPS would hurt economy—impose costs of $175 billion

Pete V. Domenici, U.S. Senator, “Federal Renewable Portfolio Standard Unfair, Unreliable,
Unaffordable,” US FED NEWS, 6—5—07, lexis.
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee,
today said that evidence was mounting that consumers would face a multi-billion dollar burden if a
federal renewable portfolio standard is adopted. Domenici today released the results of a study
commissioned by the Edison Electric Institute that reveals that nationally, the cost of a federal RPS
would be $175 billion through 2030. Much of that burden will be on states that lack the natural
resources to meet the RPS, especially those in the southeast, though according to the study, 27 states
will be unable to meet the standard. The numbers that are coming in on the cost of a federal Renewable
Portfolio Standard are exactly what I feared. A federal RPS which includes just a limited number of
resources will do little to lower emissions, since so many states simply can't meet it. Consumers that live
in states without wind energy will face higher costs through no fault of their own, Domenici said.
Status Quo Solves
Status quo is sufficient to spur renewables development—current expansion proves

That the combination of state and federal financial incentives and state RPSs has been successful is
evidenced by a growth in renewable energy generation since 2001. According to the Energy Information
Administration, data compiled from 2001 through 2007 illustrate that thirty-six states have increased
generation from renewable energy resources, with total renewable energy generation increasing by
22.6% during this time period.
A national RPS will blunt state momentum—potential preemption, REC double-

counting, administrative problems
Practical Considerations of a National RPS,” CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW v. 42 n. 5, 7—10, p. 1486-1488.
Many of the articles favoring enactment of a national RPS fail to consider some of the very real, practical
impacts a national RPS may have on the momentum of the current renewable energy market, as well as
on the policy objectives of the states that have enacted RPSs.
A. Momentum of Renewable Energy Markets
1. State RPSs and REC Markets
Given that many of the state RPSs have requirements that are more stringent than those in the
American Clean Energy and Security Act Bill (the “Waxman-Markey Bill”),45 the question of what
happens when a national RPS is layered over the existing state RPSs is a fundamental one. Under the
Waxman-Markey Bill, there is no state preemption issue. Although all states must satisfy the national
requirements, the WaxmanMarkey Bill allows state RPS requirements to exceed those in the proposed
national RPS. The languishing Senate bill46 also allows state RPSs and includes eligible renewable
technologies similar, but not identical, to those allowed in the Waxman-Markey Bill. It is unclear
whether technologies eligible under a state RPS but not under a national RPS would still be permissible.
Even if such technologies were permitted, but would earn only state RECs, the question remains as to
whether such facilities would ever get built when eligible for only part of the revenue stream.
Financially, it would make more sense to build facilities that would qualify under both state and national
RPSs.
Both bills contemplate a dual REC, where each megawatt-hour of energy produced from a renewable
energy facility would earn one federal REC and one state REC. Although workable, such a system could
be more cumbersome to implement and administer, requiring a duplication of efforts and cost.
An alternative not contemplated by either bill would be to make eligibility for national RPS compliance
just another “attribute” on a REC issued by any of the existing tracking systems. This federal attribute
could still be unbundled from the state REC and sold or transferred separately. Such a system would be
less confusing for those already in the market and would minimize implementation and administrative
costs.
Assuming the federal attribute is unbundled, or federal RECs are wholly separate from state RECs, the
potential for double-counting under a national RPS becomes another possible concern—one not fully
addressed by either bill. Although the federal bills prohibit double-counting of federal RECs, they do not
address or attempt to mitigate the consequences of counting a REC representing one megawatt-hour of
generation at both the state and federal levels. If a state RPS’s annual requirements exceed those under
the national RPS, in regulated states where utilities own the generation, the utilities will have more
federal RECs than needed for their own federal compliance. These utilities would likely seek to sell their
surplus federal RECs on the market to lower their compliance costs. If, however, these surplus federal
RECs are purchased by other utilities to satisfy their compliance obligations, the more stringent state
RPS requirement may be undercut. Instead of driving high REC prices and additional generation,
compliance with stringent state RPSs would in effect be subsidized by the sale of the federal attribute of
the REC. Such surplus federal RECs could be used by a utility in another state to satisfy its federal
compliance requirement without creating any additional generation. To avoid this outcome, the national
RPS would have to require that a federal REC be retired for every state REC used for state compliance.
Concerns regarding double-counting have also been raised by participants in the voluntary REC
markets.47 Green-e® and other certification program rules prohibit the use of a REC for compliance with
a state RPS program and the selling of the same REC in the voluntary REC market. The reasoning is that
the renewable energy a customer buys should be above and beyond what would otherwise have
occurred without the REC purchase.48 The same reasoning would have to be applied to any national RPS
program, such that a federal REC could either satisfy the national requirement or be sold in the
voluntary REC market, but not both.
Current state RPS’s are superior for renewables development—flexibility

As stated by Professor Davies, thirty-five states and the District of Columbia currently have an RPS in
effect.5 Wishing to address the climate change issue, the states have jumped into the void created by
the lack of federal legislative action. The state RPSs, in conjunction with a variety of state6 and federal
financial incentives,7 have provided the encouragement and flexibility needed by developers to get
new renewable energy facilities financed and built.8 This flexibility is essential for balancing
environmental benefits with cost and reliability concerns.9 Flexibility also fosters an atmosphere that is
more conducive to innovation and the development of new renewable energy and energy efficiency
technologies. Further, state legislatures and public utility commissions understand that the construction
of new generation requires a compromise between affordability and reliability for customers and
profitability for generators.10 A national RPS focused solely on environmental benefits may create an
unworkable regulatory regime from the standpoint of both customers and generators.
A2 “Definitional Problems”
National RPS fails—narrow definitions of renewables cannot account for local

variances
Unlike a national RPS, a state RPS has the flexibility to take advantage of the state’s natural resources
and local industry. A more narrowly tailored definition of “renewable energy” would thwart the ability
of the states to generate clean energy using the resources most readily available to them. A national RPS
that only encourages the core and sub-core technologies (or some sub-set thereof) will stifle the kind of
ingenuity shown by Maryland in finding a use for the large amount of waste generated by one of its
largest industries, or Vermont in using the byproduct of its dairy industry to create clean energy.18
Further, as a result of the variation in geography and natural resources,19 there will always be disparate
development of renewable energy across the country. For instance, it is unlikely that a land-locked state
such as Kansas would include ocean or tidal resources in its list of eligible technologies. But such
exclusion is merely the legislative reflection of the state’s environmental reality. Even with a national
RPS that includes “ocean/tidal” in its definition of “renewable energy,” such a facility would never be
built within the state of Kansas given the lack of availability of the resource. Instead, an ocean or tidal
facility will inevitably be built in one of the nineteen states (plus the District of Columbia) where
ocean/tidal is already an eligible technology
A2 “RECs”
States already allow out-of-state RECs, have justification for local project incentives
Further, many state legislators have other, equally important (and politically expedient) goals in addition
to that of incentivizing the overall development of renewable energy resources. Such goals may include
furthering economic development by encouraging developers to build within their state borders. They
may also include the displacement of “brown” power generated within their borders with clean power
generated within their borders. The “barriers” created by the state RPSs are intended to provide the
economic incentives needed to attract developers to that state. That said, many state RPSs, such as
those in New England, do allow the importing of energy and RECs from adjacent states, thereby
encouraging the creation of regional markets.29 The same is true of many of the western and mid-
western states.
States take advantage of the fiscal / incentive benefits of RECs now—tracking systems
While state RPSs have encouraged the development of renewable energy facilities by providing a market
for the buying and selling of clean energy, the development of the regional tracking systems31 has
facilitated the growth of another revenue stream for developers: the REC. The tracking systems are
software-based systems that allow the trading of renewable attributes by creating certificates that can
be bought and sold without encumbering the associated power markets. The RECs are sold either
separately from the energy via bilateral REC contracts, or can be “bundled” with the sale of energy (and
often capacity32) in bilateral power purchase contracts. Having long-term power purchase and/or REC
contracts in place is a critical early step in project development and crucial in obtaining the financing
needed to construct a new facility. Without this additional revenue stream, made possible largely by the
enactment of state RPSs, it is unlikely that the United States would have had the growth in renewable
energy generation that it has witnessed since 2001.
Further, since many RPSs allow electric suppliers33 to satisfy their RPS requirements through the
purchase of RECs, the tracking systems serve another important role in allowing the electric suppliers
and regulators to track compliance with the state RPSs. These tracking systems have, in fact, created a
“larger, more liquid market” and have provided electric suppliers with “greater options for
compliance”—the very goals Professor Davies seeks from a national RPS.34
In addition to these benefits, the tracking systems have done much to weaken any perceived geographic
barriers created by certain state RPSs. The tracking systems (mirroring the importing regulations of
many of the state RPSs)35 allow the importing of RECs and energy from adjacent states and, in certain
cases, from Canada.36 In fact, with the recent launching of the North American Renewables Registry
(“NAR”), available for generating facilities and regions not covered by any other tracking system, there is
no portion of the United States that is without access to a tracking system.3
RPS Fails
National RPS fails—policy distraction, system-wide barriers block renewables

development
1449-1450.
Debates about energy policy frequently conflate the mandate and market unification aspects of a
national RPS. Even if a national RPS does not contain a mandate, promoting market unification through
national renewable credits can provide many benefits to existing national developers of renewable
energy—by curing problems associated with leakage in state regulation and promoting the use of
renewable energy credits. I agree with Professor Davies’ analysis to the extent that he is arguing for a
nationally unified renewable credit market. By adopting market unification for renewable credits,
Congress can promote the stability of state regulation and encourage each state to take an ambitious
approach to promoting renewables that is tailored to its regional situation.
Professor Davies and other strong advocates for a national RPS, however, oversell other aspects of a
national RPS mandate for renewable sources of electric power. Market unification of RECs can be
disentangled from a nationwide RPS mandate. Effectively, a national mandate has the effect of a tax,
and to call it something else does not solve the highly contentious distributional issues it presents, or
mask that it may not be the most efficient lever to induce technological change in the energy industry.
Geography matters to any regulatory approach that encourages the development of renewable
resources, and it cannot be expected that policies to significantly advance renewable project
development will have uniform costs and benefits across states and regions of the United States. An RPS
mandate would change firm behavior and would have substitutability effects that could undermine the
very goals an RPS purports to advance. And even if a national RPS is adopted, renewable projects will
continue to face enormous legal and regulatory barriers, particularly relating to project siting,
transmission capacity, and cost allocation. If a national RPS extends a mandate to states that currently
do not have one without also paying attention to issues such as who pays for the RPS, the pricing of
carbon, and federal or regional management of siting and fuel mix, the larger goals of a national RPS will
remain elusive.
A national RPS mandate on its own would accomplish little more than a symbolic victory for advocates
of renewable energy and climate change mitigation. Of course there is hope that expressive legislation
in this context may be useful in shaping public attitudes and, over time, changing social norms.82 As I
have argued in this Commentary Article, however, a national RPS mandate can change firm and industry
behavior in ways that will present unintended consequences. It also distracts policy makers from
addressing the tangible legal, regulatory, and economic obstacles faced by developers of renewable
power projects. A more comprehensive approach to energy policy is the only way to ensure that a
national RPS meets the full range of its stated goals. The simple reality is that the regulatory approach to
achieving these goals needs to confront broader system-wide barriers to the development of
renewable projects in the electric power industry than an RPS does.
National RPS fails to promote RE—other barriers

1428-1429.
Past efforts to use legal reforms—and especially regulatory mandates—to induce technological change
in the energy industry, however, have produced mixed results.8 At the national level, renewable power
as an overall percentage of the nation’s portfolio of power generation has grown only slightly over the
past thirty years.9 Despite the optimistic predictions of many national RPS advocates, a national RPS
mandate is unlikely to be the silver bullet that destroys the significant barriers to renewable power
development, including siting and cost allocation barriers that limit the ability of renewable energy to
compete on a large scale with more conventional forms of power generation. A national RPS is
especially unlikely to have a tangible impact on climate change mitigation without larger scale
modifications to the electric power system which, on its own terms, an RPS fails to address.
This Commentary Article highlights some of the economic issues presented by a national RPS mandate
and, based on its limits, offers only a cautionary defense of it. Part II briefly summarizes the regulatory
approach of a national RPS and identifies its primary goals, which are not always coextensive. Part III
emphasizes how specific mandates that are focused—at least at the margin—on a handful of states may
not be as efficient or fair of a regulatory approach to promoting new renewable technologies as using
other regulatory tools, such as broad-based subsidy financing through an income tax. Further, where
demand for a regulated activity is elastic, mandates produce substitution effects for firms that can be
inefficient or have other unintended consequences. In short, a national RPS may crowd out the next
least expensive form of generating electricity—natural gas—at the cost of both efficiency and climate
change mitigation. Part IV addresses how some of the distributional, inefficiency, and substitutability
problems created by a national RPS can be alleviated with other regulatory tools, such as broad-based
national subsidies, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, or broader national or regional approaches to energy
resource management. Part V concludes that, at best, a national RPS should be approached with
caution. Whether a national RPS is desirable will depend on how it is designed and whether it is part of a
larger energy package containing more fundamental reforms to the electric power system.
RPS fails—does not change underlying, bad state regulatory/decisionmaking

environment
1447-1448.
As Professor Davies highlights, adopting a national RPS could usher in a new era in which many of the
goals and regulatory tools in environmental and energy law merge. Such a merger has been occurring
over the past thirty years.79 The concern with the national RPS with a vehicle for such a merger is that it
nationalizes renewable energy requirements while leaving many other decisions, including overall utility
fuel mix and the siting of renewable facilities, in the hands of state and local regulators. One particular
area of convergence that a national RPS could make inevitable in the future regards decisions about the
planning and siting of new power plants. Decisions regarding the planning and siting of power plants—as
well as decisions about fuel mix and power generation portfolios—were historically within the hands of
state and local regulators. Not surprisingly, state and local regulators considering such decisions focus
almost entirely on the benefits to their in-state customers. With adoption of a national RPS, regardless
of whether it contains a significant mandate or focuses on REC market unification, it is unlikely that state
regulators can continue to view such decisions entirely from the perspective of their own customers. As
debate over the national RPS highlights, decisions as to what kind of plant to build and where to build it
are no longer purely state and local issues and cannot be resolved without attention to regional and
national goals.
As a legal matter, a national RPS on its own terms will not transform power plant siting and planning
decisions from state and local issues into national ones. Once a national RPS is adopted, however, it
seems inevitable that siting decisions for power plants will increasingly become regional issues, if not
issues in which national concerns are regularly implicated. Professor Davies highlights how a national
RPS can solve some Dormant Commerce Clause concerns presented by the most egregiously
protectionist state RECs.80 While parochial state REC subsidies appear to raise serious Dormant
Commerce Clause issues, it is also interesting that many state REC programs that provide subsidies only
to in-state producers have not actually been challenged—perhaps because the producers who would be
most likely to challenge such laws frequently benefit from similarly parochial RECs in a neighboring state
in the same region of the country. Even if this constitutional defect were cured by a national RPS,
though, a national RPS coupled with national REC markets and the broader wholesale market will likely
give rise to new Dormant Commerce Clause challenges to state regulation of siting and planning of
power plants. It seems unlikely that expanding the relevance of a competitive market to energy
developers will reduce constitutional challenges to the state regulations that continue to impose a
formidable barrier to the development of renewable energy projects.
RPS Fails: Transmission Barriers—2NC
Transmission barriers confound an RPS

1446-1447.
The transmission siting obstacles federal authorities have begun to address are significant, as limited
transmission infrastructure remains one of the largest obstacles to widespread deployment of
renewable resources. For example, a recent study prepared for the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory suggests that it is feasible for wind power to constitute twenty to thirty percent of the
electric generation capacity for the eastern two- thirds of the United States, but that this would require
the investment of over $100 billion in transmission infrastructure.76 State and national RPS mandates
do nothing to remove the obstacles associated with seeking state and local regulatory approval for
transmission infrastructure. Indeed, the barriers are far deeper than RPS advocates care to
acknowledge. One of the major disputes in transmission also is who should bear the costs of new
transmission infrastructure—an issue that divides states and requires federal regulators to explicitly
address cost allocation issues between producers and consumers of electric power from new renewable
projects. Renewable project developers and customers in large urban areas, for example, stand to
benefit from transmission upgrades in the Midwest, but utilities that do not stand to immediately
benefit have opposed efforts to regionalize the costs of these projects in transmission rates. In a recent
Seventh Circuit case, Judge Posner wrote an opinion that required the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission to quantify the benefits from allocating the costs of new transmission to wholesale
customers.77 Dissenting in part, Judge Cudahy favored regional sharing of transmission costs given the
difficulty with quantifying reliability benefits of new transmission.78 Such cost allocation issues remain
one of the most contentious issues today in the energy industry. Not only does a national RPS fail to
address them, but it also may delay their resolution. To the extent that a national RPS mandate is
coupled with RECs, it could obscure any urgency to upgrade transmission by fragmenting renewable
markets and encouraging the development of projects in geographic areas that face no current
transmission constraints.
National RPS Undermines RE: 2NC
National RPS will lower REC prices—decreases incentive for new RE projects
As mentioned above, the revenue stream provided by RECs is important to the financing of a renewable
energy project. Therefore, the monetary value of the REC is critically important from the generator’s
perspective. Proponents often cite the ability of a national RPS to create lower priced clean energy and
RECs.38 Generators, however, do not want low REC prices, nor are they concerned about uniformity in
price, unless those prices are uniformly high. The generators are interested in maximizing their revenue
stream to lower their (and their lender’s) risk and meet their financing obligations. To the extent an
assured revenue stream will lower risk and thereby lower the risk premium built into the financing, the
resulting lower interest on the developer’s debt may translate into lower energy costs for customers.
Rather than encouraging the development of new renewable energy resources, low REC prices tend to
have the opposite effect.
The monetary value of an REC is driven by several factors. First, the requirements of a state RPS will
often promote certain types of renewable energy over others. This is apparent by either the
establishment of various “classes” of eligible technologies and/or the inclusion of “multipliers” or
“adders.” For instance, Connecticut’s RPS has three distinct classes of eligible technologies. Class I
resources include solar, wind, fuel cells, methane gas from landfills, ocean thermal power, wave or tidal
power, low emission advanced renewable energy conversion technologies, certain runof-the-river
hydropower facility (less than 5 MW) that began operation after July 1, 2003, or certain sustainable
biomass facilities.39 Class II resources include energy derived from a trash-to-energy facility, certain
biomass facilities that began operation before July 1, 1998, or certain runof-the-river hydropower facility
(less than 5 MW) that began operation prior to July 1, 2003.40 Class III resources include the electricity
output from combined heat and power systems that are part of customer-side distributed resources
developed at commercial and industrial facilities in Connecticut on or after January 1, 2006, a waste
heat recovery system installed on or after April 1, 2007, or the electricity savings created in Connecticut
from conservation and load management programs begun on or after January 1, 2006.41 The value of a
Class I REC tends to be significantly higher than the value of Class II or Class III RECs.
Multipliers or adders inflate the value of one type of renewable energy over another. For example,
under Nevada’s Energy Portfolio Standard, a 2.4 multiplier has been applied to solar photovoltaics
(“PV”); therefore, a facility producing one kilowatt-hour of electricity from a PV system in Nevada will be
credited 2.4 RECs rather than 1 REC.43
Second, REC values are also determined by the needs of the electric supplier that must satisfy the state
RPS. Each RPS requires an electric supplier to provide some minimum percentage of their retail load
using renewable energy with such percentage increasing on an annual basis. For instance, under
Connecticut’s RPS, in 2010, an electric supplier must supply seven percent of its retail load using Class I
renewable energy, three percent using Class II or additional Class I, and four percent with Class III.44
These annual requirements determine the amount and types of RECs the electric supplier must
purchase and thus drive the demand for certain RECs within the market.
Lastly, REC values are affected by supply and demand. If, for instance, the demand for Class I RECs
created by an RPS is close to or equal to the supply of RECs eligible for that RPS, REC prices tend to rise
to a price near the state RPS’s alternative compliance payment price (“ACP”). If that demand is less than
the supply of those RECs, REC prices tend to drop to a price substantially below the state ACP.
National RPS will slow renewables development—multiple reasons

Despite arguments to the contrary—and there are many59—there appears to be little hard evidence
that a national RPS would ensure a more diversified, clean energy supply that would be both more
reliable and more cost-effective. Rather, the adoption of a national RPS at this stage—years into the
development of a U.S. renewable energy market—may slow down, if not halt, the very momentum
federal legislators seek to stoke. In addition, there are a host of factors that impact the development of
renewable energy generation and markets upon which a national RPS will have little effect, including:
the availability of financing; transmission and reliability issues; land use constraints; public support for,
or opposition to, certain renewable energy resources (e.g., wind); and energy costs, which vary widely
across the country. Each of these factors is a potential hurdle to the development of new renewable
energy generation. Although a national RPS may provide a single definition of renewable energy and
impose a national requirement on electric suppliers to purchase a certain percentage of their load from
such renewable energy resources, in overcoming the above hurdles, a national RPS offers no more than
its state brethren.
National RPS Undermines RE: A2 “Grid”
Grid fragmentation is inevitable, will not be solved by a national RPS

Professor Davies also argues that state RPSs erect geographically based barriers to trade that
“undermine the very markets they seek to build.”25 He further states that “without those limits,
developers might find it more cost-efficient to build a facility . . . just inside . . . [the] border and transmit
the power into [the neighboring state].”26 To the extent that geographical barriers exist, however, they
are more a byproduct of the U.S. transmission grid than of the state RPSs and their underlying
objectives. As Professor Davies states, “There are three primary power grids in the United States—the
Texas Interconnect, the Eastern Interconnect, and the Western Interconnect—and power generally does
not flow readily among them.”27 Even with a national RPS in place, wind farms built in the Texas
panhandle cannot currently be used to provide clean power to the load centers of the Northeast.2
Federal RPS mandates are too inflexible—states and localities are better situated to
act
Mary Ann Ralls, Senior Regulatory Counsel, National Rural Electic Cooperative Association, “Congress
Got It Right: There’s No Need to Mandate Renewable Portfolio Standards,” ENERGY LAW JOURNAL v. 27,
2006, p. 471-472.
In all of the debates over the past ten years, Congress was right: renewables constitute an important
component in meeting our nation's power needs, one which is valuable in protecting the environment
and helps decrease our dependence on foreign oil. Nonetheless, if renewable programs really are to be
[*472] beneficial, and not just to "special interests" in the industry, then they must be considered in the
context of how best to provide safe, reliable, and affordable power. Moreover, there must be the
flexibility to consider and reconsider mechanisms within renewable programs that take into account
regional, state, and even local differences. The role of the state, utility, or cooperative is to ensure that a
renewable program incorporates all components that are necessary to produce renewable energy that
is cost-effective and reliable. The challenge is to find the balance between realizing the promises of
renewable energy while protecting consumers and communities from adverse impacts. A renewable
program can fall into one of two categories: "elegant, cost effective, flexible policy" or "poorly designed,
ineffective, or costly ... ." n135 Regional consortiums, states, local municipalities, and individual utilities
are best positioned to evaluate the panoply of renewable data, in conjunction with their policy
objectives, to establish programs that work for their citizens and consumers. At the end of the day, the
goal of any renewable program should be to provide cleaner, reasonably-priced and reliable electric
service. Mandates such as a federal RPS will not achieve these goals.
Renewables potential is too variable across the states—means state RPS is far more
effective
Mary Ann Ralls, Senior Regulatory Counsel, National Rural Electic Cooperative Association, “Congress
Got It Right: There’s No Need to Mandate Renewable Portfolio Standards,” ENERGY LAW JOURNAL v. 27,
2006, p. 467-468.
Eligible fuel sources constituted a third bone of contention in the debate of S. Amdt. 791. As discussed
supra at Part II, advocates of a broader list argued that since no one resource/fuel is prevalent and
available in every single region, state, or utility service area, a successful renewable program would
encompass whatever was there, including hydroelectric, nuclear, and municipal waste. n103 Proponents
of a narrow list asserted that the purpose of a federal RPS was to incentivize a market for new
renewables, which would succeed only if eligibility were limited to less prevalent technologies such as
photovoltaics, solar, and wind. n104 What these proponents either failed or refused to grasp is that,
with this significant range of natural resource diversity, a federal market (even with congressional
support) is not practicable. A federal market is not practicable because utilities in regions with less
abundant eligible resources would only pay into the market and would never benefit from the market
financially. Market circumstances vary as much as the available renewable fuel sources do, since one is
dependent upon the other. In the Texas Study, Wiser and Langniss [*468] conclude that one of the
most important problems in RPS design is "inadequate attention to the relationship between the
renewable energy purchase requirement and eligible renewable energy sources." n105 States and local
programs have been structured to take advantage of Mother Nature as well as man-made and animal-
generated products. In Maryland's case, that includes poultry-litter incineration, which uses a byproduct
from a long-standing Maryland industry. n106 Pennsylvania includes IGCC-coal and coal bed methane
and California includes wave energy. n107 Recently, the Florida Public Service Commission voted to
order utilities to offer a variety of contractual pricing options for purchases from generating facilities
using solid waste and "vegetable matter," among other renewable sources. n108 Fort Collins, Colorado
has a goal that does not specify renewable fuel types. n109 Ultimately, what the states, utilities, and
local municipalities know, and incorporate into their assessments of "eligible" renewables, is that in
some areas, certain renewable resources will not be feasible. As a U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report noted, even taking into account all available federal and state incentives,
improvements in technology and rising natural gas costs, "wind power will continue to be too expensive
to compete with fossil-fuel generation in parts of the country with poor wind resources." n110
DA: E-Prices—L
RPS bad—electricity prices, threatens economy

Grover Norquist, President and Patrick Gleason, Director, State Affairs, Americans for Tax Reform,
“Rethinking Renewable Energy Mandates,” POLITICO, 12—18—11,
www.politico.com/story/2011/12/rethink-renewable-energy-mandates-070610, accessed 8-14-16.
A renewable energy standard is nothing new. In fact, 29 states and the District of Columbia have a
binding renewable energy standard on the books. The Democratic election waves of 2006 and 2008
swept in many liberal state legislators who, though they hadn’t run on it, passed renewable energy
mandates once in office.
We’ve now had a few years to see some of the results. It isn’t pretty for taxpayers or the economy.
Renewable energy standards, by design, are intended to drive up energy costs — requiring utilities to
use more expensive and often less reliable sources of energy. Not surprisingly, such laws have hit
ratepayers hard. States that have a binding RES now have electricity costs that are 39 percent higher
than states that don’t have a binding RES.
Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute has examined the effects of these mandates in individual states,
and the results don’t get better. The RES in North Carolina, one of 2012’s key battleground states, is
projected to reduce real disposable income by $56.8 million and likely be responsible for the loss of
3,592 jobs by 2021.
New Mexicans could pay an estimated $2.3 billion more for their power and lose more than 2,800 jobs
by 2020, as a result of that state’s RES. Beacon Hill projected similarly bleak economic effects in various
other states with an RES.
Opposition to renewable energy mandates should not be misinterpreted as an aversion to renewable

energy. In fact, renewable sources could play a significant role in the future. But as Todd Wynn of the
American Legislative Exchange Council astutely noted in a Cascade Policy Institute report: “Legislation
that forces the use of renewable energies despite the resistance of the economy distorts the free
market, reduces our freedom and raises the cost of doing business, thus endangering economic
growth.”
RPS increases electricity prices

n. 5, 2010, p. 1467-1468.
Depending upon its stringency, a national RPS seems likely to impose immediate costs that are greater
than Professor Davies suggests. As a preliminary matter, I agree with Professor Davies’ observation that
the costs of a national RPS are very difficult to estimate, and may include both benefits (e.g., new jobs
and price stability benefits of a diversified energy mix) and costs (e.g., building transmission associated
with renewable plants) that are difficult to foresee, let alone quantify. I also agree that any fair
comparison of the costs of renewables with traditional sources ought to include an estimate of the
social and environmental costs of those traditional sources. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the initial
compliance costs matters politically, and I think Davies overstates the probability that immediate cost
impacts of a national RPS will be small. It is axiomatic that the rate impacts of a national RPS will be a
function of the degree to which the RPS forces real change in the energy mix. Citing a relatively small
number of studies that focus on existing state RPSs, Professor Davies implies that price increases are not
likely to exceed two cents per kilowatthour (“kWh”), an increase he calls small or moderate.66 These
estimates are consistent with those of the Energy Information Administration.67 This mean effect,
however, may belie widely varying effects in different parts of the country; and in most places, two
cents per kWh represents a fifteen to thirty percent increase in electricity rates.
More importantly, if the studies Professor Davies cites include those state RPSs that were more symbolic
than action-forcing (less aspirational, high on salience distortion, low on enforcement rigor, in Davies’
nomenclature), we would not expect to see much in the way of cost impacts because those RPSs are not
actually forcing change. By contrast, if a national RPS will be action-forcing, it ought to have a larger
impact on electricity prices. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Green Power Network publishes an index
of the premiums electric utilities charge for renewable power in various states. While these data do not
measure the overall cost impacts of an RPS, they do seem to reflect a larger than two cents per kWh
premium for renewable power in some parts of the country.68 If members of Congress suspect that
their constituents are unwilling to pay even a two cent per kWh increase, they are unlikely to support a
national RPS.
RPS increases EPrices

Joshua P. Fershee, Assistant Professor, Law, University of North Dakota, “Changing Resources,
Changing Market: The Impact of a National Renewable Portfolio Standard on the U.S. Energy Industry,”
ENERGY LAW JOURNAL v. 29, 2008, p. 59.
Some major studies indicate a potential increase in consumer electricity costs if a national RPS were
implemented. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a study in June 2007 of a proposed
15% RPS by 2030, which indicated that “cumulative residential expenditures on electricity from 2005
through 2030 are $7.2 billion (0.4 percent) higher, while cumulative residential expenditures on natural
gas are $1.0 billion (0.1 percent) lower.”70 For a 25% RPS by 2025, the costs would likely be much more
significant: “the cost of complying with the [25% RPS] is projected to increase the price of electricity by
about 3.3 percent and 6.2 percent in 2025 and 2030, respectively.”71 On a more local level, opponents
of the Proposed RPS have claimed that consumers in some states could see electricity bills rise as much
as $15 per month.
DA: Grid
The plan places great strain on the grid

n. 5, 2010, p. 1457-1458.
In fact, the move to competition in the electricity industry has, in some ways, made the world less
hospitable for renewables. When electric utilities were vertically integrated operations, and investors
could count on a guaranteed return on investment (through cost of service ratemaking), investment in a
power plant or a transmission line was a much less risky venture. The owner of the grid was also the
owner of most or all of the generation of the system, and the owner did not need to worry about
competition from yet-to-be-built plants, or whether there would be adequate transmission to get the
power to customers. That is no longer the case. Prospective investors in renewable and nonrenewable
plants alike must worry about competition. A national RPS would provide a guaranteed market to
renewable plants, but does not ensure that any particular plant will find a customer. Nor does it
guarantee that the owner of the generating plant will be able to get his power to customers. For that,
the owner needs a connection to the grid.
Restructuring of electricity markets has brought competition to wholesale markets, but it has also
strained the electric grid by drastically increasing the number and volume of arms-length wholesale
electricity sales. More energy is traveling longer distances over the grid than ever before, and
investment in new transmission capacity is not keeping pace with demand. To the extent that RPSs
provide incentives for construction of central station renewables, such as wind farms or concentrated
solar plants, those facilities are likely to be located far from the customers they will serve. This will put
additional strain on the electric grid, and we are already seeing disputes over who should pay for the
extension of transmission lines to renewable generation plants located far from load.22 This is primarily
a cost allocation issue and does not undermine Professor Davies’ case for a national RPS, but it does go
to the question of the magnitude of the benefits of an RPS.

RPS + Renewables Bad

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RPS + Renewables Bad

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Renewables DA

Solar disposal causes e-waste exports –

As recently as 2010, China

RPS increases non-CO2 pollution—SO2

National RPS will concentrate RE in high-value areas—localizes the economic benefits

RPS too slow to solve--momentum

Climate effects are limited—firm substitution effects

RPS leads to a shift away from NG generation—confounds climate goals

The plan displaces gas generation

That turns the advantage

National RPS would hurt economy—impose costs of $175 billion

Status quo is sufficient to spur renewables development—current expansion proves

A national RPS will blunt state momentum—potential preemption, REC double-

A. Momentum of Renewable Energy Markets

1. State RPSs and REC Markets

Current state RPS’s are superior for renewables development—flexibility

National RPS fails—narrow definitions of renewables cannot account for local

National RPS fails—policy distraction, system-wide barriers block renewables

National RPS fails to promote RE—other barriers

RPS fails—does not change underlying, bad state regulatory/decisionmaking

Transmission barriers confound an RPS

National RPS will slow renewables development—multiple reasons

Grid fragmentation is inevitable, will not be solved by a national RPS

RPS bad—electricity prices, threatens economy

Opposition to renewable energy mandates should not be misinterpreted as an aversion to renewable

RPS increases electricity prices

RPS increases EPrices

The plan places great strain on the grid

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