TOKYO — In many countries, higher oil prices have hurt pocketbooks and led to worries about economic slowdowns. But here in Japan, Kiminobu Kimura, an architect, says he has not felt the pinch. In fact, his monthly energy bill is lower than a year ago.
A reason is his new home fuel cell, a machine as large and quiet as a filing cabinet that sits in front of his house and turns hydrogen into electricity and cold water into hot — at a fraction of regular utility costs. But even with the futuristic device, which is available for now only in Japan, Mr. Kimura has not let up on the other shortcuts that leave him unscathed by last year’s oil squeeze.
WOKING, England — Josephine Copeland and her 20-year-old daughter, Jo Jo, visited Primark at the Peacock Center mall here, in the London suburbs, to buy presents for friends, but ended up loaded with clothes for themselves: boots, a cardigan, a festive blouse, and a long silver coat with faux fur trim, which cost £12 but looks like a million bucks. “If it falls apart, you just toss it away!” said Jo Jo, proudly wearing her purchase.
Environmentally, that is more and more of a problem.
With rainbow piles of sweaters and T-shirts that often cost less than a sandwich, stores like Primark are leaders in the quick-growing “fast fashion” industry, selling cheap garments that can be used and discarded without a second thought. Consumers, especially teenagers, love the concept, pioneered also by stores like H&M internationally and by Old Navy and Target in the United States, since it allows them to shift styles with speed on a low budget.
But clothes — and fast clothes in particular — are a large and worsening source of the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, because of how they are both produced and cared for, concludes a new report from researchers at Cambridge University titled “Well Dressed?”
WASHINGTON — The Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol industry’s major lobbyist, works out of cramped offices that it shares with a lawyer near Capitol Hill. Pictures of ethanol plants from its 61 board members hang everywhere. “We’re about to run out of wall space,” said Bob Dinneen, the association’s president.
The association may only have six staff members but it is now bursting with energy, a far cry from the early days when its founder, a South Dakota farm boy who was convinced America needed to break the stranglehold of foreign oil, quit in frustration after four years.
After three decades of surviving mostly on tax subsidies, the industry is poised tonight to get its biggest endorsement from on high that it has a long-term future as a home-grown alternative to gasoline.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush is expected to call for a huge increase in the amount of ethanol that refiners mix with gasoline, probably double the current goal of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.
While the details of the proposal are not known, 15 billion gallons of ethanol would work out to more than 10 percent of the country’s current gasoline consumption, and is far beyond the current capacity of about 5.4 billion gallons.
At least half of the new ethanol would come from corn, signaling the administration’s support to the Midwest farm states that have benefited the most from the recent ethanol boom.
For an industry once dominated by the will of a single powerful producer, Archer Daniels Midland, ethanol has come a long way, joining the oil industry and producers of major agricultural commodities as an entrenched political force in Washington. And it now enjoys a powerful role in presidential politics because of Iowa’s status as one of the first states to select delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions.
But with dozens of new ethanol plants coming online this year, the ethanol lobby is facing a critical point. The political reality is that corn’s days as the chief crop for making the fuel may be numbered.
Many leaders of American industry are coming around to the view that global warming is occurring and that Congress will address the problem. In contrast, a few companies are considering major investments in old technologies for burning coal that would both endanger the climate and jeopardize the financial position of their investors and shareholders. As members of the U.S. Senate, we have both worked on legislation designed to combat global warming and to reduce greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. Although our approaches have differed slightly, we both agree that global warming is real, that we need to act rapidly to pass legislation, and that we are committed to working together to achieve that result as soon as possible. Global warming is an enormous threat to mankind, and the United States can, and must, be a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
With new energy-focused bills, Stevens delights enviros and Obama disappoints
By Amanda Griscom Little Grist Magazine 12 Jan 2007
Among the barrage of energy-related bills already unleashed by the 110th Congress, one of the most progressive comes not from the newly empowered Democrats, but from Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, a zealous proponent of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Just as peculiar, one of the bills that most rankles environmentalists comes from Democratic golden boy Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois
By Jessica Kowal The New York Times December 27, 2006
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — The standoff here between farmers and environmentalists was familiar in the modern West.
With salmon and wildlife dwindling in the Skagit River Delta, some environmentalists had argued since the 1980s that local farms should be turned back into wetlands. Farmers here feared that preachy outsiders would strip them of their land and heritage.
This year, though, the standoff ended — at least for three longtime farmers in this fertile valley, who began collaborating with their former enemies to preserve wildlife and their livelihoods.
The Nature Conservancy, which usually buys land to shield it from development, is renting land from the three farmers on behalf of migrating Western sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, marbled godwits and other shorebirds.
By Gregory Dicum The New York Times January 4, 2007
William Leininger is not your typical environmental zealot. A Navy commander who works as a doctor at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, he is a Republican and lives in one of California’s most conservative counties, in a development of neat lawns and Spanish-style houses. His 2,400-square-foot, single-level house — “the usual Southern California design,” he said recently — is barely distinguishable from its neighbors, apart from one detail: the red-tile roof is crammed with solar panels.
· Struggling carmaker goes green at motown show · Industry experts sceptical about ‘magic’ technology
Andrew Clark in Detroit Monday January 8, 2007 Guardian
The world’s biggest carmaker, General Motors, has come up with an electric idea to spark its flagging fortunes: a mass-market battery-powered car called the Volt, which it believes could finally tempt motorists away from the internal combustion engine.
Although the car is still at a conceptual stage, GM said the Volt would contain a plug-in battery capable of powering it for 40 miles. Unlike previous attempts at electric cars, it will also have an electric generator on board able to produce more energy when the battery runs low.
By Steven Mufson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, January 4, 2007; A01
House Democrats are crafting an energy package that would roll back billions of dollars worth of oil drilling incentives, raise billions more by boosting federal royalties paid by oil and gas companies for offshore production, and plow the money into new tax breaks for renewable energy sources, congressional sources said yesterday.
Eager to paint themselves as different from the Bush administration and the past Republican majority, Democratic leaders are targeting a manufacturing tax cut in 2004 that they say gave unneeded incentives to the oil industry, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said in a briefing yesterday. Hoyer said Democrats are also planning to force oil companies to pay royalties on deepwater Gulf of Mexico tracts leased in 1998 and 1999; the Interior Department has said that the leases inadvertently failed to include provisions for royalty payments once oil prices rose above certain thresholds.
