From SouthernStudies.org
A bill that would have ended North Carolina’s renewable energy program was voted down this week by a state House committee in a bipartisan vote by a surprisingly wide margin.
House Bill 298 was backed by more than a dozen conservative advocacy groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the John Locke Foundation — organizations that have considerable influence in North Carolina’s Republican supermajority-controlled legislature.
So how did the measure lose?
In a word: jobs.
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From the moment talk of repealing the state’s renewable energy standard began intensifying following last year’s election among conservative groups that have long denied the reality of global warming, the state’s sustainable energy industry and environmental advocates pushed back by focusing on the law’s track record of creating jobs and other economic benefits.
The N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, an industry lobby group, commissioned an economic analysis of the law, which passed in 2007 by a wide bipartisan margin and was the first of its kind in the Southeast. Released in February, the study conducted by RTI International and La Capra Associates found that North Carolina’s law has been a driver of clean energy development, which in turn as been an important job creator for the state.
The researchers found that while the state’s economy lost more than 100,000 jobs from 2007 to 2012, clean energy development led to a net gain in employment of 21,162 “job years” (one job that lasts one year) over the same period. It also found that tax credits used by renewable energy projects were important revenue generators for state and local governments, and that the bill would save ratepayers millions of dollars over the long term by avoiding construction of costly new power plants.
In all, the study found that North Carolina has reaped $1.7 billion in total economic benefits from the law over the past six years. …
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