Straw man. TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO, Kevin Phillips pointed out in “Wealth and Democracy”(and backed up his thesis with historical data) that consistently, repeatedly, during the periods that “conservative” administrations (and by this I mean, backed by the richest and most powerful people, and, not coincidentally happening to be the Republicans and their ideological ancestors) correlated quite strongly with (1) massive increases in the public debt and (2) relatively poor growth in the GDP.

Democratic or “progressive” administrations, OTOH, correlated consistently with (1)relatively small increases in the public debt, if not reductions of it (see Clinton, Bill) and (2) relatively strong increases in the GDP. Furthermore, over the last 36 yrs (a period where the Federal government was controlled more often than not by Republicans), inequity in income has grown steadily (Phillips wrote this in the mid-80s, but it was true up to that time, and it’s still true).

The trope that “Conservatives run the economy better than Democrats” is only true if you believe that “The Economy” consists only of the top 1% in income. “functional” might agree with that assessment, but why in the hell should his opinion matter to me, for example??

efficiency
wind
wave
geothermal
hydro
High temp solar thermal for electricy
low temp solar thermal for space and water heating
biomass.

Nonsense. Nuclear is more expensive than efficiency, more expensive than wind. If you really were serious about nuclear as a way to decrease carbon emission, then you would have to favor breeder, not light water reactors; while uranium is a common element on earth, uranium that can be extracted and processed for less energy than is produced is rare; uranium that can be so processed economincally rarer still. If we were to drastically increase the percent of power provided by uranium, we would use up the cheap uranium quite quickly and nuclear power would be even more expensive than it is – comparable to solar thermal with thermal storage. Similarly breeder reactors in practice have proven comparable in price to run to solar thermal with storage (which is why that breeder reactors for power production rather than for military purposes either end up being shut down or converted to light water reactors).

then this

It’s the way that more advanced countries (such as France) get most of their electrical power
Seriously, my country is on fire these days. Functional, as much as I enjoy discussing with you, there is something that prevents it: you have assumptions about “liberals” and what they should do that I do not share. I suggest that it might be you are mistaken about what they believe or should believe.

That’s what makes a good liberal, right?

I don’t know what makes a good liberal, but here are a few energy policies I would personnally think sound: 1) An immediate end of exploitation of nuclear energy. 2) The establishment of strong system of internalization of externalities, perhaps via a taxes on CO2 emmission. 3) Strong incentives to reduce energy consumption, probably via the most effective tool that I can think of: a sharp increase of prices. 4) Strong incentives to adopt renewable energies.

Comparing this with the actual act, you now understand (I hope) why I don’t like it. And you can thus direct your justified exasperation to the proper target.

I love that troll.

True, disposing of nuclear waste is an interesting engineering problem, but on the whole, it’s certainly safer than coal mining.

It tastes great when mixed with Kool-Aid, or so I hear.

Seriously, it’s easy to trade cheap insults. Do you have anything else to add to the discussion?

Pot-kettle-black.

Most of the “facts” you’ve cited come from that Wikipedia entry.

Note first that the entry appears to be a work in progress, and an incomplete one: “A fellow editor requested that someone provide references or sources for the information in this section.” The numbers for the tax breaks are confusing; for two of them, numbers are given as “?.?”. More importantly, it doesn’t state the duration of the tax breaks.

The quality of research in the article is questionable, given that the number for the tax breaks for the nuclear industry is pulled from a nuclear industry website.

Hardly. It could, for example, show that Bush had to compromise with people who wanted those things in order to get goodies for the oil companies.

• The Washington Post contended that the spending bill is really a broad collection of subsidies for United States energy companies; in particular, the nuclear and oil industries [3].

• Texas companies in particular benefit from the bill. This criticism is heightened by the fact that the President, the United States House Majority Leader and the House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman are all from Texas.

• A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial on July 28th, 2005, suggested Congress had a “let’s pass it and claim we did something” attitude.

• Even supporters of the bill concede that the bill will do little to lower oil prices immediately, and that any changes the bill has enacted will not happen overnight.

• John McCain denounced the 2003 bill (which was not passed) as the “No Lobbyist Left Behind” Act[4].

• Speaking for the National Republicans for Environmental Protection Association, President Martha Marks said that the organization was disappointed in the bill: it did not give enough of a short to conservation, and continued to subsidize the well-established oil and gas industries that don’t require subsidizing. [5]

• The bill has had the unintended effect of causing shortages of E85, an ethanol and gasoline blend of fuel, in many parts of the country. Section 701 of the bill requires US Federal fleet flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) to operate on alternative fuels 100% of the time. Formerly, such FFVs were required to be operated by the end of 2005 on alternative fuels only 51% (i.e., the majority of the time) by Executive Order 13149. (See Executive Order 13149 [6], dated April 21, 2000.) This effectively means that the US Government’s use of E85 has been doubled, with the unintended results of limiting public availability of E85 fuel and increasing its price. Although the price of corn has not changed, from which ethanol fuel is derived, the shortage has removed the price incentive to switch to alternative fuel.
  

For the umpteenth time, all of the above shows that Bush accepts the basic liberal premise that the government ought to do three dozen different things to improve the environment.

Now maybe he doesn’t do ENOUGH; or maybe he doesn’t do it PRECISELY on your terms; or maybe he mixes in a few corporate subsidies (just as all liberal politicians do).

None of that detracts from the overall point of David Boaz and David Bernstein: If this bill had been signed by a liberal politician, all of y’all would be cheering it on, praising the President who signed it, and attacking the nitpickers who criticized one or two elements of the deal.

You’re just proving the Davids’ point, in other words. When a liberal politician comes up with a plan (on energy, immigration, the environment, education, whatever), liberals will gently point out that they have one or two reservations about the plan, but will otherwise support it. When Bush signs a bill that has dozens of items, and that is maybe 80% of what a liberal President would have proposed, all of sudden you whip around and pull out the one element of the bill that you don’t like, and then pretend that the bill consisted of nothing else.