By GROVER G. NORQUIST & PATRICK GLEASON
Renewable energy standards are intended to drive up energy costs, the authors write.
It’s been a rough two years for global warming alarmists.

Cap and trade failed in 2009, despite the fact that Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House. The recent United Nations summit produced an agreement that means little — with countries like Canada dropping off an extension of the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, high unemployment and economic woes are drawing public attention from environmental issues.

Groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, left in the legislative wilderness, must be wondering where to go from here. The consensus among Democratic offices on Capitol Hill is that the best hope for their agenda — now that cap and trade is dead for good — is to pass a national renewable energy standard. This would require utility companies to produce a certain percentage of electricity from renewable sources.

Thankfully, we have the states — those “50 laboratories of democracy,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called them — to show us that this mandate, like cap and trade, would drive up electricity bills for families, increase costs for employers and destroy jobs — and likely be unfeasible, to boot.

A renewable energy standard is nothing new. In fact, 29 states and the District of Columbia have a binding renewable energy standard on the books. The Democratic election waves of 2006 and 2008 swept in many liberal state legislators who, though they hadn’t run on it, passed renewable energy mandates once in office.

We’ve now had a few years to see some of the results. It isn’t pretty for taxpayers or the economy.

Renewable energy standards, by design, are intended to drive up energy costs — requiring utilities to use more expensive and often less reliable sources of energy. Not surprisingly, such laws have hit ratepayers hard. States that have a binding RES now have electricity costs that are 39 percent higher than states that don’t have a binding RES.

Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute has examined the effects of these mandates in individual states, and the results don’t get better. The RES in North Carolina, one of 2012’s key battleground states, is projected to reduce real disposable income by $56.8 million and likely be responsible for the loss of 3,592 jobs by 2021.

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