My Climate Strategies Watch colleague Mark Newgent has a piece up at the Charlotte Observer‘s Web site (too much election material crowding out other issues in the paper itself) about the 56 recommendations that were published earlier this month by the North Carolina Climate Action Plan Advisory Group. Earlier this month the Locke Foundation exposed the fraudulent, excessively optimistic economic analysis that the Energy Center at Appalachian State University did on those recommendations, which Mark references:
To mitigate the perception of further tanking an already shaky
economy, CCS/CAPAG sought an outside analysis of their
recommendations from Appalachian State University’s Energy Center,
which for a fee (about $28,000) produced the desired results. The
Energy Center reported that if the state implemented most of
CCS/CAPAG’s proposals, North Carolina would realize $2.2 billion in
new net income and $1.2 million in net gross state product by the
year 2020. However, the Energy Center’s analysis is a statistical
sleight-of-hand. The Beacon Hill Institute, an economics think tank
at Suffolk University in Boston, performed an external peer-review of
the Energy Center’s study and identified several flaws in its
methodology. BHI found that the Energy Center did not accurately
quantify benefits in a way that meaningfully compares them to costs;
that they assessed costs as benefits; and that they understated the
true costs of CCS’s/CAPAG’s recommendations.
And elsewhere across the fruited plain today I’ve got an extremely long investigative report up about environmentalists’ and governments’ cooperative efforts to push climate alarmism and thwart oil and gas development in Colorado. I’ve also posted a summary of the report.
