From Staci Matlock: A well-known Taos attorney’s proposal to develop a wind farm has angered some residents near the site, including people in the Cielito Lindo subdivision, where homes rely primarily on solar energy.
This week’s episode of coal-to-liquids watch involves Shell and Anglo American Plc., which were planning a coal-to-liquids plant in Australia, incorporating carbon capture. Now? Not so much, says Bloomberg: Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Anglo American Plc have delayed plans to develop a A$5 billion ($3.2 billion) project in Australia to convert coal into clean …
Tim: Some are decrying the loss of millions of jobs if the Big Three go belly up. Will they cry as loud if Big Oil cuts jobs as we move to electric, or hydrogen (or manure based) cars? Just wondering.
So says EIA: The increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 resulted primarily from two factors: unfavorable weather conditions, which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings; and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance on fossil energy sources (coal and natural gas) for electricity generation, increasing the carbon intensity …
Continue reading ‘US greenhouse gas emissions up 1.4 percent in ’07’ »
Jennifer Thacher, writing on the New Mexico Independent, makes the point about job creation in the green energy world: What about the arguments that investment in green energy will create new jobs? It is important to make clear whether we are talking about net new jobs or just new jobs in a particular industry. In …
One of the messages I got from the whole framing-media-science-policy discussions of the past couple of years was the idea that I (the media part of that equation) don’t solve problems by providing any one explanation of stuff. So, for example, I can do a story, as a colleague and I did earlier this year, …
Dan Yurman calculates the jobs he thinks would be created by expanding the federal loan guarantees for nuclear power: The Federal loan guarantee program for construction of nuclear power plants, set by Congress at $18.5 billion, could if expanded to cover the entire fleet of 21 proposed new reactors, create nearly 80,000 construction jobs, and …
Continue reading ‘On Federal Energy Investment and Job Creation’ »
Does “energy independence” make sense as an energy policy rationale? One of the oft-repeated themes of the presidential campaign was the idea that every U.S. president since Nixon has called for energy independence. Here’s Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf: A second broad rationale for government intervention in energy markets is national security concerns. In 2006, the …
Dieter Helm, writing in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, offers the counter-argument to the point made recently by Andy Dessler that the peak and inevitable decline of fossil fuels may put some sort of upper limit on our ability to to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: Some argue that, however intense the dash-for-resources, …
“SASOL’s plans to build a new coal-to-liquids plant in Limpopo, with a production capacity of 80000 barrels per day, are continuing.” Business Day “Louisiana Energy Services is proposing to double the size of a southeastern New Mexico plant being built to make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.” AP New Mexico rig count down. Me. …