Posted by David Roberts on 27 Dec 2006 at Grist.org
Former U.S. President Gerald Ford died yesterday at 93.
At the bottom of this post is a long section on energy from Ford’s 1975 State of the Union speech. In it he noted that America’s surplus oil — and its attendant ability to stabilize world oil prices and prevent the emergence of a petroleum cartel — had vanished in 1970; we had become net importers of oil. He worried about our loss of energy independence and recommended a crash course in energy production.
You will recall that President Carter took those concerns seriously and put in place programs to address them.
But the cartel that formed after we lost our energy independence, OPEC, quite enjoyed our dependence. Rather than use it to hurt us, it plied the world market with cheap oil, upon which floated enormous U.S. prosperity. Ronald Reagan abandoned all pretense of fighting for energy independence and instead cruised on cheap-oil-driven economic growth to “Morning in America.”
Continue Reading Gerald Ford and the deferred dream of energy independence
Posted by Paul on December 31, 2006
By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times
December 28, 2006
Wind, almost everybody’s best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications.
Engineers have cut the price of electricity derived from wind by about 80 percent in the last 20 years, setting up this renewable technology for a major share of the electricity market. But for all its promise, wind also generates a big problem: because it is unpredictable and often fails to blow when electricity is most needed, wind is not reliable enough to assure supplies for an electric grid that must be prepared to deliver power to everybody who wants it — even when it is in greatest demand.
In Texas, as in many other parts of the country, power companies are scrambling to build generating stations to meet growing peak demands, generally driven by air-conditioning for new homes and businesses. But power plants that run on coal or gas must “be built along with every megawatt of wind capacity,” said William Bojorquez, director of system planning at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Continue Reading It’s Free, Plentiful and Fickle
Posted by Paul on December 28, 2006
By Mat Probasco
Associated Press Writer
October 25, 2006
Researchers fear more than half the world’s coral reefs could die in less than 25 years and say global warming may at least partly to blame.
Sea temperatures are rising, weakening the reefs’ resistance to increased pollutants, such as runoff from construction sites and toxins from boat paints. The fragile reefs are hosts to countless marine plants and animals.
“Think of it as a high school chemistry class,” said Billy Causey, the Caribbean and Gulf Mexico director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“You mix some chemicals together and nothing happens. You crank up the Bunsen burner and all of a sudden things start bubbling around. That’s what’s happening. That global Bunsen burner is cranking up.”
Continue Reading Scientists: World’s coral reefs in danger
Posted by Paul on December 23, 2006
By Talli Nauman
El Universal Writer
November 18, 2006
The concept of a fence on the line that joins the United States and Mexico is a chicken-hearted response by weak-kneed U.S.-elected representatives who do not care about resolving migration conflicts.
Ever since I started writing analyses about migration 20 years ago, it’s been the same old story. Actually, it’s been the same old story for more than a century – since before I was born, FYI. The implications for the environment haven’t changed either. So here we go again.
On Sept. 30, the U.S. Congress authorized a payout for two parallel fences to close 700 miles, or nearly one-third, of the entire U.S.-Mexico border. In the first week of October, President George W. Bush went down in history for signing the appropriations bill for $1.2 billion worth of otherwise perfectly good taxpayers’ money for the potentially fatal measure.
The 15-foot tall fantasy with flood lights, farcically ordained to stop undocumented migrants, would choke the life – wild and otherwise - out of a 200-mile corridor of one of North America’s most important boundary waters, the Rio Grande, aka Rio Bravo – that is from its east end at Brownsville, Texas (across the line from Matamoros, Tamaulipas), to Laredo, Texas (across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas).
Continue Reading The Green Line: Why the Border Fence Deserves conservationists’ cold shoulder
Posted by Paul on December 17, 2006
By Steve Lohr
The New York Times
December 12, 2006
The iconic culprit in global warming is the coal-fired power plant. It burns the dirtiest, most carbon-laden of fuels, and its smokestacks belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.
So it is something of a surprise that James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a coal-burning utility in the Midwest and the Southeast, has emerged as an unexpected advocate of federal regulation that would for the first time impose a cost for emitting carbon dioxide. But he has his reasons.
“Climate change is real, and we clearly believe we are on a route to mandatory controls on carbon dioxide,” Mr. Rogers said. “And we need to start now because the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive this is going to be.”
Global warming is not only an environmental hazard, but also a great challenge for economic policy. Without economic incentives, analysts say, the needed investments in industrial cleanup, innovative low-carbon technologies, fuel-efficient cars and other ways of reducing energy waste will not occur.
Continue Reading The Cost of an Overheated Planet
Posted by Paul on December 15, 2006
By Elizabeth Olson
The New York Times
December 10, 2006
When the holiday season rolled around three years ago, Joseph Kennedy found that the Christmas trees available near his new home in Jacksonville, Fla., weren’t like those he remembered from his years living in Boston.
“We looked and looked, but the trees were not as nice and too expensive,” Mr. Kennedy, 44, said, calling their needles “razor sharp.”
But Mr. Kennedy, a stay-at-home dad, and his wife, Sheena, were determined to have a real tree for their daughter, Catherine, who is now 5, so he took his brother’s advice and ordered an evergreen online. He has since bought a tree on the Internet each year including the 7½-foot Fraser fir that arrived at his door last week.
Continue Reading The Perfect Tree Awaits in the Field, or in the Computer
Posted by Paul on December 11, 2006
Conservation: Technology would heat mansion using energy from waste pipes
By Heather May
The Salt Lake Tribune
November 4, 2006
Jeff Niermeyer, Salt Lake City’s second in command in charge of water, has a joke that goes like this:
How many toilet flushes does it take to power a light bulb?
The city is searching for the answer - sort of.
It is embarking on a pilot project that would heat and cool a private business by using water warmed and chilled by a sewer line.
Sounds gross. But it should be perfectly sanitary.
Continue Reading His mind’s in the sewer - it’s a hot idea
Posted by Paul on December 09, 2006
By Felicity Barringer
The New York Times
November 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — Last week’s election whipsawed the Congressional committees that are crucial battlegrounds for environmental and energy legislation. But even many environmentalists believe that an ambitious new agenda is unlikely.
The leadership changes are striking. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who favors mandatory cuts in emissions linked to global warming, will become chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, replacing Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has called the scientific consensus on human-induced global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind.”
In the House, Jerry McNerney, a California Democrat and wind-energy executive, will replace the current chairman of the House Resources Committee, Representative Richard W. Pombo, a Republican who fought to open public lands to private interests.
“I think you’d have to go back to the Enlightenment to find such a big change in worldviews,” Ken Cook, the president of the Environmental Working Group, a research organization, told reporters on Monday.
Continue Reading Environmentalists, Though Winners in the Election, Warn Against Expecting Vast Changes
Posted by Paul on December 06, 2006
Reuters
November 16, 2006
Washington has rejected pleas by UN chief Kofi Annan to cut greenhouse gas emissions and dismissed his charge that there is a “frightening lack of leadership” in fighting global warming.
“We think that the United States has been leading in terms of its ground-breaking initiatives,” Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, told reporters at the UN climate change conference in Nairobi.
The US is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and it and Australia are the only major industrialised countries to reject the Kyoto Protocol, which sets greenhouse gas emission targets for developed countries.
Continue Reading US rejects UN plea to cut gas emissions
Posted by Paul on December 01, 2006
