Earth Track Blog

When the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the nuclear industry's global cheerleader, describes potential damages from a reactor accident, they do so in a strategically simplistic way: Operators of nuclear power plants are liable for any damage caused by them, regardless of fault. They therefore...

There has never been a systematic review of global subsidies to energy that capture all fuels, all countries, and both the consumer and producer sides of the market. However, a recent article on cybercrime (quite an interesting read) by Michael Riley at Bloomberg allows some interesting comparisons...

Below is an article on the end of VEETC titled "Looking at Life With an Ethanol Subsidy," published in Farm Futures on December 28th. In only a few short paragraphs, it captures so much of the industry spin on these issues over the years that is provided a great framework for calling them out. A...

In a perfect world, publication of what is at its core a listing of financial commitments to energy activities by public banking institutions should not be an item of particular note. For the most part, the shareholders of these banks are Western nations with a tradition of accountable public...

With so much focus on the US federal budget deficit, it is easy to forget that the directed legislation, subsidies, and political bias plaguing our national government exist at the state and local levels as well. While this certainly complicates the process of trying to figure out who is getting...

Renewable Identification Numbers, or RINs, are the credits generated by biofuel blenders to demonstrate compliance with mandates under the US federal Renewable Fuel Standards. When the mandates are binding, these RINs sell for real money. Assuming the ethanol excise tax credit expires as intended...

Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss are winning no friends in the renewable energy industry with their article "A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search." I understand some of the upset. After all, even with the most positive interpretation possible of the negligence that led to vast amounts of...

Like implant dentists or utility accountants, subsidy wonks can go to trade meetings (yes, meetings on natural resource subsidies do exist) to find people who talk our language. In that "safe" space, we can be met with a knowing nod as we wax poetic on the difference between revenue loss and outlay...

Last week, the New York Times ran an article ( "Future of Solar and Wind Power May Hinge on Federal Aid" by Kate Galbraith) discussing the reliance of solar and wind energy on federal subsidies. Bernard L. Weinstein, associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Cox School of Business...

As fallout from the Solyndra bankruptcy continued to build, Jonathan Silver, Executive Director at DOE's Office of Loan Programs finally stepped down. This outcome couldn't have been a total surprise for him: Silver came from a venture capital background, knew the failure rates of DOE's projects...

1) Don't Prop up USEC. Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and Autumn Hanna at Taxpayers for Common Sense weigh in at the National Review Online on a proposed $2 billion dollar loan guarantee to finance new enrichment facilities for the United States Enrichment Corporation...

Defenders of Title 17 energy loan guarantee programs periodically point to the many other areas of the economy in which the government makes direct loans or guarantees. They use the other programs as evidence for two main points: that the government is experienced and skilled in leveraging public...

Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) sent an interesting letter to Fred Upton (R-MI) late last week. The correspondence outlined some of the history of the Title 17 loan guarantee program and the nuclear industry's push to make it their own. It also included examples of the role the Nuclear Energy Institute...

Those of us who have been railing on the government's increasing push to make massive loan guarantees available to individual energy firms are not surprised to see the first major bankruptcy. Solyndra went down with $535 million in federal guarantees for lots of reasons. The marketplace is...

Kayla Ente at Ente Consulting has recently released a summary of current subsidies to nuclear power in the UK (summary discussion - full report). The analysis joints a number of other recent studies (US, France, and Japan) that tabulate government subsidies to the civilian nuclear industry around the world.

A couple of stories related to energy innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have crossed my desk today, highlighting very different aspects of the school's role in trying to solve energy problems. The first relates to a what many of us normally associate with MIT: interesting...

Like so many attempts to strip away senseless subsidies before it, the most recent Congressional push to eliminate at least a handful of expensive subsidies to the oil and gas industry was blocked in May. But the growing deficits remain, and with them the pressure for fiscal austerity and the need...

The Japanese Parliament has just passed a new law that pumps the equivalent of $26 billion into a fund to pay for damages caused by TEPCO's Fukushima disaster. This is an "initial" contribution, so more could be on the way. Rather than viewing this massive bailout to nuclear power as a failure in...

EIA's newest subsidy study leaked on the weekend, and was officially released today. It's a long report, so I want to spend more time reading through it before doing a detailed post. However, my quick read on the weekend was enough to know that my earlier concerns on their mandated scope of research...

This May 2011 piece ( What's an Oil Subsidy?) by Nick Loris and Curtis Dubay took the issue of subsidies to the oil and gas industry head-on. I've had discussions with Heritage over a number of years on the issue of energy subsidies, though primarily those dealing with nuclear and ethanol. I hope...