I’ve got this energy-water hammer, and they all look like nails right now. Today’s nail is jatropha, one of the next-gen bio-energy darlings. Or not: Jatropha, a biofuel crop favoured for its ability to grow in areas not suitable for food, may be about to become less popular. A new Dutch study shows it uses …
I recently finished up a piece at the day job on the connection between water and energy, and perhaps as a result, everywhere I turn these days I’m seeing stories on the linkage. Today’s example comes from Cynthia Barnett: Matthew Cohen, a professor in UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation, and post-doctoral researcher Jason …
My Albuquerque Journal colleague Mike Coleman has a nice example in today’s paper (might be behind paywall, a bit of a crapshoot there) of the horse trading now underway in an attempt to win passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill: Rep. Harry Teague, a southern New Mexico Democrat, this week persuaded the authors of a …
Continue reading ‘Waxman-Markey Horse Trading, a Case Study’ »
On counting to 60 votes in the U.S. Senate.
I just got a new cell phone. When I unplugged it after its first charge, the phone’s screen displayed a message reminding me to unplug the charger to save energy when not in use. Yes!
“The Saudi Arabia of X” is a common new energy meme that has been applied, among many things, to the oil shales of the western United States. But its invocation requires some significant arm-waving over the question of water, as this report by Jeremy Miller points out: But it is water – or more specifically, …
Continue reading ‘“insufficient water to meet needs”, energy edition’ »
The European Union has released its latest greenhouse gas emissions report, and on paper it looks good. Emissions are 9.3 percent below 1990 levels. But if you look closely at the data, there is perhaps less reason for optimism than the number, on its face, suggests, as Roger Pielke Jr. notes, the largest reductions in …
I have the typical attention span of a journalist, and once the gas price spike turned into whatever the opposite of a spike is, I rushed off to the next front page thought, but really, gas prices have remained interesting: But for full context, also this: Sorta hard to see without referring to the underlying …
Continue reading ‘Gas Prices Creeping Up, Demand Still Down’ »
In a parallel to previous discussion of resistance to state-leve cap-and-trade measures, Kate Galbraith has a roundup of failures to increase gasoline taxes at the state level: One by one, the state-level proposals to boost the gas tax — which I wrote about in January — are, well, running out of gas. The latest casualty …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a look at the difficulties in Congress as greenhouse gas regulation becomes real rather than an abstract exercise: Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., was one of 26 Democrats who joined Republicans last week in voting to make it harder for the Senate to act quickly on President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Realities of Cap and Trade’ »