Trump Found Another Way to Hurt North Carolina

 

Renewable energy is a growing industry in North Carolina’s economy. The state has over 7,300 jobs in the solar sector and ranks fifth in the U.S. for total installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

--NandO Business News

Trump gives big love to oil and gas tycoons, and he parrots their attack lines against solar and wind. In the first month of his 2nd term, Trump's Department of the Interior suspended all clean energy development. Last August Trump called solar energy "THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY." His Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, at the same time Trump was mashing keys on Truth Social, announced that his department would rescind “all programs building solar panels on our farmland.” Yeah, we get the picture.

Trump has been told that somehow the generation of energy from direct sunlight and wind drives oil and gas prices up, along with electricity -- ridiculous notions that are easily disproven. Like with every other stupid notion that lodges inside his brainpan, Trump has been relentless. He deliberately placed high tariffs on almost all materials needed to build large-scale solar projects, and the Big Beautiful Turd passed last July by the Republicans in Congress eliminated all tax credits for wind and solar energy. 

Trump can nail the shriveled and bloody skin of Pine Gate Renewables in Asheville, a leading solar energy development firm, to his trophy wall (dammit!). Pine Gate Renewables is closing its Asheville plant and laying off more than 78% of its workforce, some 223 people in Buncombe, as it files for bankruptcy. According to the NandO, Pine Gate has 107 projects with three gigawatts of power capacity, which could power over 2.3 million homes. Pine Gate also has over 130 projects in development, which would have over 30 gigawatts of capacity if completed. If in this case means never. In paperwork filed with the state, Pine Gate blamed its dissolution on Trump.

“With respect to the renewable energy industry, legislative and regulatory challenges have significantly slowed solar power development,” the company's filing with the state said. “In combination, these forces have put extreme pressure on Pine Gate’s liquidity and overall financial position.”

NC Budget Deal: Teachers, Retirees Still Get the Shaft

The Republican leaders waited until almost midnight last night to release their budget deal, and a few hours later today, the Senate side of the General Assembly intends to take their first vote on a 500-page document that no one has read and only The Bosses understand. (The House plans to vote on the deal on Thursday & Friday.)

Veteran teachers/state employees ... no pay increase for any of you, just that insulting $750 "bonus" (YEE-haw!).

State retirees ... no cost-of-living increase for any of you.

Millions of $$ more siphoned off of public education to send kids to private schools with little-to-no-accountability ... $25 million more of public money to the so-called "Opportunity Scholarship" program ("opportunity" mainly for money-grubbing, for-profit operations which promise the moon and sometimes deliver an ant-hill).

New sales taxes on repair and maintenance services because ... the lower-end of the income scale gets to bear more of the burden for this Republican revolution.

No more tax credits for solar and other renewable energy projects because ... fuck this shit!

Long Knives Out in Raleigh To Kill Solar

This man, Rep. Mike Hager of Rutherfordton, has drunk deeply of the Koch Bros. tea (made of four parts petroleum and one part fantasy), and has embraced hostility to solar energy as his crusade to rid North Carolina of the coming evil of "renewable energy."

"Sustainability" is a nasty word to Mike Hager.

Backed by the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, the political lobbying arm of the Institute for Energy Policy, Mr. Hager held a round-table, ritual gutting of solar energy and other "renewables" at the General Assembly yesterday in an effort to convince his fellow legislators and the general public that the state's modest feint toward encouraging renewable energy with tax credits not only endangers democracy but actually robs poor people of money they could use to buy more lottery chances.

Some bird-nosed "expert" actually claimed at the meeting that solar energy took an average of $3,800 of disposable income out of every North Carolina household in 2013.

These legislative fossils who eat, drink, and spew fossil fuel will also be deeply embarrassed when ice-melt swamps the coast. No, check that. They won't be embarrassed at all. They'll still be deep in that river in Africa.

Jabba the Putz

Dwane Powell, N&O, 22 May 2015

To appreciate fully this Dwane Powell cartoon, you must understand that Sen. Bob Rucho chairs the NC Senate Finance Committee and

...that last Wednesday Sen. Rucho abruptly cut off debate on whether North Carolina should continue encouraging solar energy projects through a provision in law that makes large energy corporations (Duke Energy, we're looking at you) buy a certain (tiny) percentage of their electricity from renewable sources and

...that the bill under debate in Rucho's Finance Committee would freeze North Carolina’s “Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard” (or “REPS”) – a law that requires a growing percentage of the state’s electricity load to be provided by renewable sources. Current law places the REPS requirement at 6%, but it is scheduled to grow to 10% in 2018 and 12.5% in 2021. And

...that the Republican senators on Rucho's committee are far from unified in wanting to scuttle renewable energy initiatives. In fact, observers say the majority in that committee last Wednesday wanted to vote negatively on that particular bill. And

...that Rucho, after cutting off debate, called for a voice vote on the bill and then declared it had passed even though it sounded like it had failed loudly, and

...that Sen. Josh Stein, a Democrat from Raleigh who is on the Finance Committee, told Under the Dome on Thursday he doesn’t mind losing, but if he wins and still loses, that’s not fair.

We're Duke Energy: We Own This State

Frank Eaton strikes again!

ASU Tops at the Solar Decathlon

The ASU "Solar Homestead" entry in the 2011 Solar Decathlon has won the People's Choice Award plus two other prizes.

That's Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu shaking Jeffrey Tiller's hand in D.C. yesterday. Tiller is chair of the Technology and Environmental Design Department at ASU.

We're so proud of Tiller and his team of creative, dedicated students.

Clotheslining the Clothesline Bans

Here's a factoid, which leads to a sign of the times: Electric clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumption.

That, from an article in today's NYTimes about the national movement to overturn local ordinances and property-owner covenants to allow the air drying of laundry outside.

Who'd have thunk it would come to a national "movement"? We've already waxed poetic about the aesthetics of wind-blown laundry, but that was set off by a purely parochial case of snobbishness in our own Hendersonville. Apparently, there's a nationwide uprising, with states from Vermont to Hawaii passing laws to affirm that it's an American right to air-dry.

For some upscale property owners, however, flapping laundry appears to signal nothing more than poverty, and they don't want to be associated with poverty, nor have their eyes assaulted by such poor homework.

How 1950s of them!

The Pleasures of Flapping Laundry

We'd rather see a backyard line full of laundry flapping in the breeze than a row of laundromat driers turning like cement-mixers in the flat glare of florescent lighting.

What happened in the last decades to make our soulless yuppies decide that air-dried laundry was some sort of affront to good taste and property values? Sez a real estate agent in Hendersonville, N.C., which has more than its share, apparently, of upscale developments that have banned by local law the outdoor drying of laundry, "It starts to look like a tenement."

In our eyes, flapping laundry looks like human life on a human scale, a savings, a freshness in the closet. This late 20th-century uppityness about "tenement" life is frankly unamerican, not to mention self-defeating.

A law introduced in the N.C. General Assembly this year would have overturned local bans on hanging laundry, but it died:

An effort in North Carolina spearheaded by Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, and backed by other lawmakers including Rep. Susan Fisher, D-Buncombe, made progress this year but died before the General Assembly adjourned last month.

Harrison first tried to go after homeowner covenants, but as opposition mounted, she substituted a bill that would have limited only city and county ordinances. Her proposal passed the House but was rejected by a Senate committee.

The Asheville Citizen-Times story linked above offers hope, nevertheless, that a citizens' uprising is happening among homeowner associations and neighborhood groups to overturn stupid local rules and Victorian squeamishness. Let the laundry flap!

Hanging laundry is aesthetically pleasing (never mind the savings in electricity and all the other environmental benefits). We remember an art installation on Sanford Mall, probably back in the early '80s, when the Appalachian State University administration allowed a faculty artist to install several clotheslines and hang a wonderful assortment of clothing and linens, all carefully chosen for color, texture, and form. The installation stayed up a few days and filled our heads with memories of home and childhood and "washing day," before some high-falutin' prude complained and the whole thing was removed.

Bring back the clotheslines!

American poet Richard Wilbur captured for us the beauties of wind and damp laundry. He saw in the moving forms the presence of angels:

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.

("Love Calls Us To the Things of This World")

Sometimes there's no antidote to stupid law like poetry.

Largest-in-World Solar Heating Project in Western NC

In Fletcher. So says the Asheville Citizen-Times.