Charleston, SC Latest Editorial News: Climate proposals fail economic test

The Climate Energy and Commerce Advisory Committee (CECAC) recently presented Gov. Mark Sanford a list of policy recommendations designed to reduce South Carolina's greenhouse gas emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

This audacious goal appears noble. However, CECAC prescriptions will do nothing to mitigate global warming and everything to raise South Carolinians' energy costs, taxes, and strangle economic growth.

CECAC hired the Pennsylvania-based Center for Climate Strategies, an avowed global warming alarmist advocacy group masquerading as a "technical consultant," to administer its deliberations. CCS receives funding from major left-wing donors such as Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Energy Foundation, and Ted Turner's Foundation. CCS has operated climate commissions in 26 states and the legislative/policy prescriptions from its cookie-cutter reports are carbon copies for every state.

CECAC/CCS proposes: restrictions on property rights; costly demand-side management programs and energy-efficiency programs; renewable-portfolio standards (RPS), which mandate utilities to purchase a percentage of their power from more expensive renewable sources like wind and solar; and taxpayer subsidies for rent-seeking wind and solar companies.

Gov. Sanford declared that he wanted a report with no mandates, yet CECAC/CCS recommended just that with an RPS: "The goals of this policy include a mandate on public and private utilities that energy efficiency programs and new renewable energy on the utility's retail distribution system each meets 5 percent of its South Carolina retail customers' electricity needs by 2020."