In a community meeting I attended, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison encouraged messages supporting the Production Tax Credit for wind energy.
Because Congress has not stopped it from expiring at the end of 2012, the wind turbine manufacturer Vestas announced the layoff of nearly 100 workers at their factory in Pueblo, Colo., and is expected to lay off most of its 1,600 Colorado employees if the PTC is not extended.
After presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the Des Moines Register that he would let tax incentives for wind energy expire at the end of the year, the Senate Republicans thwarted the formerly bipartisan extension of this critical tax credit most likely to show loyalty.
As it currently stands, these are the consequences of the Republican tax-raising, job-killing polices.
Romney and the congressional Republicans have been “picking favorites based on campaign contributors” by willingness to mortgage away the iconic green energy jobs of the future while pledging to maintain the $4 billion per year subsidy for oil companies and other corporate welfare giveaways to industries that are already well established and receiving windfall profits.
In fairness, the ultimate culprit here is not the position-changing Romney who once created the Green Energy Fund as governor of Massachusetts. The real ones pulling Romney’s strings are secretive oil billionaires who have pledged more than $200 million to defeat President Barack Obama.
In their votes, the GOP are so fixated on catering to their big oil and coal bankrollers that they are no longer serious about their own rhetoric on job creation and lower taxes when it comes to an estimated 37,000 wind energy jobs. If the secretive oil billionaires win politically, we could forever lose our opportunity to build the better, more sustainable world in time for peak oil and climate disruption.
Despite the imperfections wind energy projects may have, cutting investments in renewable energy, the related infrastructure and education is the national equivalent of cooking the goose that lays the golden egg.
