Earth Track Blog

Government mortgage insurers Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC) have been in the news quite a bit lately. Last week it was the most recent multi-billion dollar payment to the US Treasury; today it is reports that Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund has just purchased...

Bjorn Lomborg ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago in which he concluded the real problem with energy markets is that there are too many subsidies to green energy. Lomborg argues that people who complain about subsidies to fossil fuels are in part misguided by the considerable...

More evidence that nuclear power isn't competitive in the marketplace is coming out of the just-announced deal for Britain's first new nuclear reactors since 1995 -- to be developed at Hinkley Point C, Somerset. The deal also provides a fairly striking example of just how badly government officials...

Some interesting research coming out of MIT and UCAL Davis challenges claims by the biofuels industry that Renewable Fuel purchase mandates have resulted in enormous savings to fuel consumers. Claimed savings have been massive, indeed. Last month, energy economist Phil Verlager published an analysis...

1) Biofuels: More problems with renewable fuel compliance credits. Remember back in July when it was discovered that investment banks were manipulating aluminum prices through an arcane and somewhat bizarre dance of trucks moving inventory to and fro among bank warehouses in Detroit? Well, they've...

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...