Monthly Archives: July 2009

Comptroller Column: Another Red Herring

Texas Jim MarstonComptroller Susan Combs in an op-ed today panders to the flat earth society with another phony study supposedly about the legislation to alleviate global warming, saying that it will wreck the Texas economy. The study is phony because it uses discredited numbers from ideological groups that receive large contributions from polluting industries and their allies. Even worse, it is phony because it doesn’t acknowledge any of the huge benefits cap-and-trade will bring to Texas. 

In Combs’s op-ed, she cites her agency’s “initial look at the cap-and-trade provisions” in the Waxman-Markey bill now pending in Congress and proceeds to lay out a worst-case scenario based on the most negative analyses from known opponents of a cap-and-trade program. Upon a close reading of this “initial look” (released as an official report), you’ll discover that the comptroller’s office openly admits that it made NO ATTEMPT to quantify any of the benefits of cap-and-trade legislation even though every neutral study on the issue Read More »

Posted in Climate, Texas / Read 2 Responses

Texans Could Save Billions Through Efficiency

Jamie Fine is an economist with EDF who recently completed a study about the costs and benefits of energy efficiency investments in Texas. Read the summary.

Old wisdom says don’t spend a dollar to save a dime. Even better? Spending dimes to save dollars. There’s a real opportunity in Texas for every home and business to spend dimes on energy efficiency to save dollars and to combat climate change at the same time.

I recently helped develop a computer model that tells us how much money Texas residents and businesses can save through energy efficiency, and the results were impressive.

With just a handful of simple efficiency investments, Texans could save more than $15 billion by 2030 – this is $760 per year for an average household and $11,000 per year for an average commercial building.

But implementing energy efficiency measures provides more than cash in the pockets of hard-pressed households and small businesses, it fights climate change too.   If these same measures are used broadly throughout Texas on existing and new buildings between 2010 and 2030, they will avoid over 760 million metric tons of global warming pollution from the electricity sector.

So what’s the next step? Read More »

Posted in Energy Efficiency, Texas / Read 6 Responses

Texas Can’t Afford Another Misguided Report

It looks like the Texas bureaucrats are at it again. A state agency recently released a report that looks at the downside of federal climate change legislation without even trying to quantify the significant upsides that a number of studies have shown. This seems to be a theme with some Texas agencies – focusing only on the doom and gloom and ignoring the benefits for Texas.  

Last month ERCOT issued a report that was so narrowly focused, the Comptroller’s office didn’t even bother trying to use it as a basis for its report. Now, the Comptroller’s office has released a deeply flawed report using the kind of biased studies that at least one TV station has refused to give paid air time to.  

Read More »

Posted in General, Texas / Read 18 Responses