Boston Globe Editorial: State renewable energy standards mean jobs

The Boston Globe argues today that other states should ignore Ohio’s recent decision to freeze the state’s policy encouraging the growth of renewable energy. The reason being? There are too many jobs and economic benefits at stake:

“In the absence of a national energy policy, about 30 states have adopted plans to create more electricity from renewable sources. This patchwork of incentives is crucial to the development of the wind-power and solar-energy industries, and hundreds of thousands of jobs; the shift to renewables is also necessary to combat climate change…Iowa, for example, gets more than 27 percent of its electricity from wind power, supporting between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs.”

Not only that, the editorial says some states are being led astray by misinformation efforts led by groups “closely aligned with the billionaire Koch brothers” including Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):

Yet even these modest state policies are under attack from groups including Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which are both closely aligned with the billionaire Koch brothers. It’s a staggeringly misguided attempt to convince voters, mostly in economically struggling states that renewable-energy targets are driving up their electric bills.”

An AWEA white paper out earlier this year refutes that myth finding states with the most wind energy save more on their electric bills. The report was compiled by staff at the American Wind Energy Association and uses publicly available data and more than a dozen studies from government, utility, and other independent sources to explore how wind energy affects consumers’ energy bills.

Read the full Boston Globe editorial here: http://bit.ly/1kO7qDX

 

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