No myth: Wind power HAS reduced Denmark’s CO2 emissions a lot

The Washington Post has adopted many strategies to stave off its collapsing circulation.  It has, for instance, gone tabloid, repeatedly publishing falsehood-filled op-eds by Sarah Palin, including one on climate science!

It also strains to print an unconventional “contrarian” analysis ever week in its “5 Myths” series, which is supposedly “a challenge to everything you think you know.”  Of course, lots of what you know is true, and that means the Post has to print lots of stuff that isn’t.

Read more

That’s the banner headline from HuffPost.  Be sure to read their story on how “Big Oil Fought Off New Safety Rules Before Rig Explosion.”  They link to some amazing NASA photos of the “worst oil rig disaster in decades”:

Read more

The process-based and partisan bickering that is derailing the Senate effort to craft climate legislation provides a good opportunity to question why this ugly process is even worthwhile. Politicians seem worried that re-election is more important than policy action, failing to recognize that clean energy reform is actually the key to political success. The mood in Washington’s marble halls and office cubicles is completely disconnected with the sense of urgency and hope found just a few blocks away on the National Mall this Earth Day weekend, in the streets of Detroit, or in the farms of Roscoe, Texas. Business as usual is waging war on America’s working families, with profits for the few and irresponsible coming at the expense of everyone else’s future. Progressive clean energy reform will change the status quo, putting America to work building a stronger, fairer green economy.

Real benefits for real people. The economy of the past, dependent on dirty fuels, puts burdens on real people – harming their health, their children, and their pocketbook. From machinists in Eaton Rapids to entrepreneurs in New Orleans, clean energy reform gives real benefits to real working families from day one, making the air cleaner and the world safer while freeing them from enriching polluters and dictators for their energy needs.

Reward work instead of pollution. The gray energy economy relies on fossil fuels that are “cheap” only because their real costs are hidden. Money flows into low-labor, high-waste energy profiteers even as society is stuck with what the market calls “externalities.” Closing the carbon loophole will get Wall Street to invest in efficiency and renewable energy jobs that can’t be exported, restoring American manufacturing in the 21st century.

Profits with principles. The Bush-Cheney-Gingrich energy scheme is a race to the bottom, as corporations create short-term shareholder and executive profits by corrupting the law and trashing principles of worker safety, public health, and environmental protection. Clean energy reform will allow America to dig out of this toxic hole, rewarding ethical investment instead of crony capitalism.

Give everybody a fair shot at a fair deal. Millions of Americans are ready and able to work hard to care for their families, but unregulated speculators and power merchants have left Main Street in disrepair. From the ashes of the gray economy we have the opportunity to rebuild America right, returning power to communities and giving people willing to work a fair shot at a clean and prosperous future.

Progress is good politics. The destruction of our planet’s climate, with increasing floods, fires, storms, and droughts, threatens the hope of recovery and the fate of our nation. The grip over our political system by polluters who siphon the wealth of working Americans into offshore accounts weakens our economy. The American people have demanded change, and want action. Politicians who have the courage to become leaders in this time of crisis can rekindle our faith in the promise of America.

As President Barack Obama said of “comprehensive energy and climate legislation” today at a wind turbine plant in Fort Madison, IA, “Our security, our economy, and the future of our planet depend on it.”

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has dug itself into quite a  deep hole.  Costs remain very, very high (see Harvard study: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 “” 20 cents per kWh!).  And nobody wants the CO2 stored underground anywhere near them (see CCS shocker: “German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere”).

Now comes a new study in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, “Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume,” by Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at University of Houston.  Here are its blunt findings:

Read more

US & Canada Lose Higher Percentage of Forests Than Brazil

All I can say is wow! Mongabay is highlighting a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which reveals that between 2000 and 2005 over one million square kilometers of forest were chopped down worldwide, with both the United States and Canada losing a greater percentage of forest than the poster children of tree destruction, Brazil and Indonesia.

Read more

“Fuel prices could easily go through $200 a barrel” in the near future

Late last year, Sir Richard Branson founded a new nonprofit, the Carbon War Room.  The objective of CWR is to “bring together successful entrepreneurs in collaboration with the most respected institutions, scientists, national security experts, and business leaders to implement the change required to avoid catastrophic climate change.”

The Virgin Group founder told Time in December, “There are some of us who believe that the problem of warming is as bad as the First and Second World Wars combined.  It’s that serious, and you know the key is carbon, [but] there’s no war room coordinating the attack on carbon.”

I interviewed the British billionaire at the CWR’s “Creating Climate Wealth” conference last week.  He had some fascinating comments on peak oil, specific measures he is pursuing in his airline business to reduce emissions, and one unexpected ‘benefit’ of his dyslexia:

Read more

Oil company profits underscore need for reform

BP just announced first quarter profits of $5.6 billion, a 135% increase over the first quarter of 20.   This profit was 50% higher than predicted by the Financial Times.

BP owns the oil rig that sunk in the Gulf of Mexico last week, with 11 employees still unaccounted for and presumed dead.  It is also leaking 42,000 gallons of oil per day.  This growing oil slick is expected to hit Louisiana’s fragile coast on Saturday.

CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and Susan Lyon have the whole story on Big Oil’s big profits in this repost.

Read more

If Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) bolts the Senate climate coalition, it must be time to turn to the “energy only” bill that centrist Democrats have been promoting as a bipartisan alternative to a climate bill, right?

Not so fast…. It is almost as difficult to add up 60 votes in the Senate for the energy-only approach as it is to find 60 votes for a climate bill.

“The energy bill is not popular with either side,” said Robert Dillon, spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), top Republican on the energy committee.

That’s the NY Times (reprinting a Greenwire piece) on the “Bingaman bill,” which passed the Energy and Natural Resources Committee chaired Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) last year.  Graham’s active support for a comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill now in question, but based on my discussions with staffers and wonks, the notion that an energy-only bill is more politically tenable is quite dubious.

The Bingraman bill “does have bipartisan support. But it also has bipartisan opposition, and that opposition has only gotten stronger in the intervening months”:

Read more