Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, isn't too impressed with President Obama's new Clean Power Plan that requires U.S. power plants to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
"A much milder version of the Obama-Hillary Clinton plan has been tried in Germany — and it has already impoverished millions,"
he writes on Forbes.com.
Germany has sought to replace reliable fossil fuels with unreliable solar and wind energy, but it hasn't worked, Epstein says.
"While Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on solar panels and wind turbines, they provide only an unreliable 15 percent of its electricity and 3 percent of total energy. Consumers pay a fortune for that unreliable energy."
Here at home we should focus on technology like shale oil and gas drilling that boosts our energy supply, Epstein says. U.S. oil output reached a record high earlier this year, and totaled 9.5 million barrels a day in the week ended July 31.
"We don’t need a 'Clean Power Plan' — a euphemism for a blackout plan, which supports unreliable technologies" with environmental problems of their own, he says.
Meanwhile, as oil prices have slumped to a four-month low this week, energy stocks have continued to tumble. That stock decline has stuck investors with $1.3 trillion of losses — at least on paper — Bloomberg estimates.
Star investor Carl Icahn's holding of Chesapeake Energy was worth almost $2 billion when oil peaked in June 2014, according to the news service. But now the stake is worth only $1.3 billion. The S&P 500 index has risen 6.9 percent during that period.
State pension funds and insurance companies have suffered big-time. Investment advisers, who manage the funds used by many retirement plans,
had a $1.8 trillion exposure to energy stocks in June 2014, according to Bloomberg.
U.S. crude oil traded at $44.96 a barrel Thursday, down 58 percent from June 2014.
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