Earth Track Blog

For the past few months, Massachusetts has been embroiled in a battle over a proposed state sales tax on software services. In a never-ending search for more revenues, the new tax was included in by Governor Deval Patrick in his January 2013 budget proposal. The terms of the tax as passed in July...

Giving up on "zombie" solar manufacturing plants in China might not be the best solution in terms of dealing with climate change and energy poverty. A Bloomberg review of overcapacity in the Chinese solar sector (Feifei Shen, "Chinese Zombies Emerging After Years of Solar Subsidies") contained some...

The headline in a recent issue of Ethanol Producer Magazine says it all: "Colo. ethanol plant scores sugar feedstock for 6 cents per pound," as though the purchaser, Front Range Energy LLC, had just won the lottery. While sugar is a regular feedstock at Brazilian ethanol plants, the US isn't exactly...

DOE has recently unveiled a price comparison tool to illustrate the reduction in fuel costs experienced by owners (or future owners) of all-electric vehicles. The screen compares the expensive cost per gallon of regular gasoline to the much cheaper energy equivalent in electrical power needed to...

If a company or an industry is going to get subsidized, there are good ways and there are better ways for it to happen if one is sitting in the corporate suite. Among the best is to receive big subsidies that, while not flowing to your competitors, arrive in a form that nobody seems to notice. The...

Note: this summary is a joint posting by Doug Koplow (Earth Track) and Ron Steenblik (OECD) As of the end of June, the Subsidyscope website has been discontinued. Subsidyscope was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts to examine federal subsidies across multiple sectors of federal activity. The...

1) Nuclear economics continue to worsen. In addition to widespread cancellations of new nuclear reactors and an increasing number of announced closures of older plants too expensive to repair and keep running (Crystal River in FL, Kewaunee in WI, and San Onofre in CA in the past six months), power...

Most people now recognize that the surge in photovoltaic installations across the United States is not just a function of falling panel prices -- though that certainly helped. But there has also been a dramatic pace of innovation in business models that have made putting a PV system on residential...

Politicians don't like to admit that they have caved, and so try all sorts of wiggles to make it look otherwise. But let's be clear: even if you call it "Contracts for Difference" instead of "Contracts that Commit Taxpayers to Pay Prices Well Above Market for a Very Long Time" the essence of what...

1) Poker, North Dakota style. Using a logic that only an industry trade association could understand, the US state of North Dakota has announced plans to close $50m/year in loopholes to oil and gas. Great! End subsidies that make no sense, such as lower taxes on low production "stripper" wells that...

Three years of freedom of information act (FOIA) requests by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), along with a fair bit of litigation when FOIA docs came back mostly black with redactions, have met with some success. SACE's efforts have unearthed a sizeable cache of documents related to...

I'm taking a quick break from the world of never-ending subsidies with this post. Just over a week ago, Elizabeth Warren was inaugurated as the first female Senator from Massachusetts. One of the thirteen original colonies, Massachusetts has been selecting Senators since 1789, a mere 224 years ago...

Earth Track is pleased to release A Review of Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. The report documents hundreds of subsidies to established fossil fuel industries and fossil fuel consumers in five U.S. states. Many of these policies have contributed to...

Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), the ranking Democratic member on the House Committee on Natural Resources, along with Rush Holt (D-NJ), yesterday made a formal request to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine US federal subsidies systematically across fuel sources. The request...

Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) are a special corporate form, used primarily by natural resource industries. They enable firms to both raise capital on public equity markets and to pay zero corporate income taxes. MLPs deserve far more scrutiny as energy subsidies than they have received to date...

Part 2 of my review of energy subsidies and the Romney campaign is a bit long for a blog posting. Thus, it has been uploaded as a PDF instead, and can be accessed here. Issues covered include conflicts between the private equity world view and good national policy; how appropriate adjustments to...

In advance of Tuesday's election, I thought it would be useful to have a quick look at Mitt Romney's vision for the country's energy future. This blog post provides links to other assessments of his broader energy plan that I think do a nice job framing some important issues, and then discusses...

Politicians love government credit subsidy programs. Direct loans, or loan guarantees (where the government will make good on a debt lent by others), provide a quick infusion of capital to favored constituent groups or industries with little or no immediate budget hit. Often, there is a nice story...

In the movie Field of Dreams, actor Kevin Costner hears a voice in his head telling him "If you build it, he will come." The "it" is a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field; the "he" is his dead father. Onlookers, of course, think he is crazy, which perhaps he is. But at least in the...

All forms of energy in the United States get some subsidies -- it's the American way, I suppose. But big PR battles are fought on who gets how much. In a recent webinar I did for The Vote Solar Initiative, my goal was to highlight the missing parts of the subsidy estimates that continue to receive...