In the Guardian, David Appell begs us to accept the grim reality: Not one of us – you, me, Obama or the greenest activist anywhere in the world – is willing to live without the comforts fossil fuels provide us – heat, light, instant hot food, convenient transportation, modern agriculture and airplane travel.
This is one of those signs that, just as people with financial skin in the energy game didn’t believe last summer’s $140-plus oil prices, neither do they believe that $40-ish will be the going price for very long. From Bloomberg last week: Rental rates for deepwater drilling rigs continue to surge as a worldwide shortage …
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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’ »