Another reason to hate Duke (Lobbying pays off ...):
Duke Energy has spent more than $10 million to lobby Congress since 2008 as electric utilities ratchet up spending to help shape new laws on climate change and other issues.
Duke spent $3.5 million in the first half of this year, federal reports show, nearly tripling what it spent for all of 1999. The $6.6 million it spent in 2008 roughly doubled its annual lobbying expenses of the three previous years.
Its chief target: legislation to cap emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas linked to global warming. Duke's fleet of coal-fired power plants makes it the nation's third-highest CO2 emitter among U.S. utilities. ...
As passed by the House in June, the bill gave Duke most of the credits it will need for 15 to 20 years for free. The Senate has not yet taken up the bill.
"That was a major achievement," said Duke spokesman Tom Williams. "I would say that was a major example of our (lobbying) presence paying off for our customers." ...
Duke was hardly alone in a lobbying frenzy stoked by the climate legislation. About 1,150 companies and advocacy groups - from biofuel advocates to religious associations - lobbied Congress in the weeks before the June vote in the House, says the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism group.
The quote in the title comes from Jim "Nostradamus" Roumasett's recent prescient post:
Those rents are up for grabs. As much as economists may recommend appropriating the permit rents for revenue-recycling via auction, the political system has its own objectives. In the polar extreme, the rents are entirely dissipated by competitive rent-seeking
