Freedumb! WV Legislature Ready To Dismantle Alt-Energy Law, Because Moar Koal Jobz!!

[hatrack]

As lawmakers move to dismantle West Virginia’s six-year-old alternative-energy law, they tout their action as another effort to help the state’s declining coal industry. However, state records show that the 2009 law actually does little to hurt the coal industry and maybe even less to really promote alternatives like wind energy or solar power. West Virginia’s coal-heavy utilities say they have been — and will continue to be — able to meet the law without adding new renewable generation.

Experts say the whole debate, pushed by the Legislature’s new Republican leadership, highlights the lack of any real discussion among most West Virginia elected officials about doing more to diversify the state’s energy portfolio and, with it, the state’s economy. “They are going the opposite direction of where they need to go,” said Jeremy Richardson, a West Virginia native who is a senior energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s just political theater.”

Echoing political campaigns by some high-profile Republicans in the state, lawmakers and some in the state’s news media have called the legislation, passed when Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was governor, a “cap-and-trade bill.” A Senate bill to repeal the 2009 law passed unanimously Wednesday. The House version is up for passage on Thursday.

Earlier this week, James Van Nostrand, a West Virginia University law professor and director of the WVU College of Law’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development, tried to clear up some misunderstandings about the issue during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. Van Nostrand told lawmakers the state’s “Alternative and Renewable Portfolio Standard” doesn’t actually require utilities in West Virginia to switch to renewable energy, hasn’t hurt the coal industry and hasn’t forced higher rates onto electricity customers.

EDIT

http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150121/GZ01/150129822/1419

[marym625]

1. That's because of RECs

Another fathom thing that makes money. Like derivatives.

[Nihil]

2. Dumbshits do what dumbshits do.

Welcome to another member of the Federal States of Dumbfuckistan.

[Panich52]

3. Soul still owned by the company store...

My home state is still beautiful, despite so much of it devastated by the coal industry. But for how much longer?

WV needs to find other ways to make use of its assets, the biggest being its mountains & its people, than by exploiting them. But coal, and now oilers, in the form of fracking, have bought fed, state & local officials.

Even the people have been brainwashed to think extracting gas & minerals is the only way to create employment. WAKE UP! The future will come. But WV's assets will have been either flattened (mountaintopping), too polluted, or moved away (the people).