Photo: Elvert Barnes

Environmental groups celebrated last fall when President Obama delayed the northern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that would pipe carbon-intensive tar sands crude from Canadian strip mines to refineries in Texas.

Now that Obama is back in the White House for a second term, those same forces are banding together to encourage the president to kill the pipeline altogether.

A new poll suggests that these groups have public opinion on their side.

The polling outfit Zogby Analytics has just conducted a survey showing very strong support for renewable energy and minimal support for the Keystone pipeline among centrist voters.

According to the poll, which was released by the National Wildlife Federation, independent voters say they would choose renewable energies like wind and solar over Keystone XL by a 4-1 margin. Only 12 percent chose Keystone as a priority. And among all voters surveyed across party lines, renewables received twice the support as fossil energies.

The survey doesn’t tell us how voters feel about killing the Keystone pipeline outright. And the comparison in the survey — which conflates electricity generation technologies like wind and solar with liquid transportation fuels that the Keystone pipeline would support — doesn’t accurately reflect the differences in energy types. But to the average voter, that doesn’t really matter.

The important finding from this poll is exactly what we’ve seen in many others over the years: Americans of all political persuasions really like renewable energy and will almost always choose it as a priority over fossil fuels.

That strong support for renewables and other clean technologies over fossil fuels was the premise of a pre-election report from the Center for American Progress. That report — designed to directly challenge the American Petroleum Institute’s multi-million dollar campaign promoting unprecedented fossil fuel development — laid out balanced regional strategies for advancing clean technologies that voters say they prefer.

As it turned out, the API campaign didn’t convince voters. And after countering hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending from groups promoting Keystone XL and expanded fossil fuel drilling, many environmental groups are feeling energized about where they stand post-election.

Broadly speaking, it looks like voters continue to stand with them.

Read more

by Justin Guay, via Sierra Club

A while back I wrote a post on the need to get India’s solar boom right. I wrote the piece because it was obvious that solar energy is primed to take off in India and it was clear there are two paths the country could take: distribute that boom to benefit the 300 million people still waiting for the grid, or forcibly centralize a resource that is most effective when distributed.

A year later, installations have grown at a blistering pace — from 80 MW a year ago to over 1 GW — but they are almost entirely centralized. And now, the question is more important than ever: To centralize or not to centralize?

Let’s start with hard reality: The grid is never coming to rural India. No matter what policy makers want to believe, decades of attempts and huge gains in supply have yielded little increase in electrification. More importantly, off grid solar installations have been dramatically cheaper than grid extension because they compete with the huge costs of extending the grid and the huge costs of diesel and heavily-polluting kerosene. That’s why the future of rural electrification is decentralized clean energy — something even the very serious IEA recognizes.

But it’s not just the IEA that gets this. Politicians are catching on as well. Take Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, whose sole political platform is delivering energy access to the 100 million people of Bihar. To achieve this lofty goal (only 18% of the population currently has access) Bihar is going to need a distributed clean energy revolution because coal-gate has deepened the already immense problems of the coal sector, making the possibility of a coal fired future impossible. If Kumar wants to remain in office, he has to rely on distributed solar.

And, of course, distributed grid-tied installations reduce peak load which can help avoid blackouts like the historic one India just suffered. In short, distributed is the way to go.

Read more

BP has agreed to pay a historic $4.5 billion criminal fine over a six-year period, after pleading guilty to 11 felony counts and criminal charges for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers. After two years, the litigation is not yet over since BP faces damages from Gulf states and additional civil charges from the Justice Department.

Much of the fine, $2.4 billion, will go to Gulf of Mexico restoration, where 5 million barrels of oil spilled over 87 days. Even now, an estimated 1 million barrels of oil remain in the waters, with excess oil washing up on Louisiana beaches as recently as September. Oil-soaked pelicans and other wildlife continue to wash up on shores. The disaster’s other legacies have produced eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions.

BP has earned tens of billions in profit since the 2010 disaster. In the last quarter alone, BP earned $5.4 billion net profit, bringing its total for the year to $9.7 billion. The company retains $15 billion in cash reserves, and has also spent $15 million lobbying Congress since 2011.

Photo: danoStL via Flickr

by Katie Valentine

America’s older coal generators are dirtier, less efficient and less utilized than the rest of the country’s coal fleet. And a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists has found they’re not economically viable either.

The report’s authors looked at each coal generator in the U.S. and determined whether its operating costs would be higher than those of a natural gas generator when updated with any of the pollution controls for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury or soot that it lacked. It found that up to 353 coal-fired generators in 31 states are “ripe for retirement” – meaning adding upgrades important to the health of communities and the planet was more costly than retiring the coal plant or using natural gas and renewable energy.

The 353 generators, which account for about six percent of the nation’s power supply, are in addition to the UCS’s estimated 288 units that have already been scheduled for retirement in the U.S.  According to the report, the two groups of generators – those which are ripe-for-retirement and those which will be closing soon – have a lot in common:

• On average, the ripe-for-retirement generators are 45 years old – 15 years past the 30-year average lifespan of a coal generator and 5 years shy of the average age of the 288 generators slated for closure.
• The two groups of coal generators are dirty – more than 70 percent of the generators identified as ripe-for-retirement lacked at least three out of the four pollution control upgrades accounted for in the study. The same is true for 88 percent of the soon-to-be-closed generators.
• The two groups are under-utilized. On average, ripe-for-retirement generators operate at 47 percent of their power generation capacity, while the generators slated for closure operate at 44 percent. The total U.S. coal fleet operates at 64 percent of its capacity.

The report found the ripe-for-retirement generators were primarily located in the Southeast, with Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida containing the most, followed by Michigan. Southern Company, which operates in Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle, owns about 27 percent of the 353 ripe-for-retirement units, but has announced the fewest number of closures when compared to other large energy companies, including Tennessee Valley Authority and Duke Energy Corp.

These findings make clear that, as America’s existing coal fleet ages and natural gas and renewable energy sources become more affordable, it will be the energy market – not environmental regulations – that plays the largest role in phasing out coal in the country. Even without accounting for needed pollution controls updates, the report found that about 40 percent of the ripe-for-retirement coal generators are more expensive to operate than existing natural gas plants.

“Consumers are hearing, especially during the election, about the EPA’s war on coal and how we need to keep coal plants open, and our analysis provides good information to show that that’s not necessarily the case,” Steve Clemmer, research director of the UCS’s climate and energy program and one of the report’s authors, said during a webcast Wednesday.

Replacing the 353 ripe-for-retirement and 288 scheduled-to-close generators with natural gas generators would reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 245 million tons per year — equivalent to 9.8 percent of U.S. power sector CO2 emissions in 2010. Of course, natural gas is not a long-term solution to climate change, and the report notes that if ripe-for-retirement generators are closed, state governments should incorporate renewable energy and energy-saving technologies into its replacement energy sources.

Katie Valentine graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism. She is an intern on the international policy team at the Center for American Progress.

by Andrea Luecke, via Renewable Energy World

After being bombarded with political ads for the past few months, most of us are relieved we no longer encounter them everywhere we turn. But imagine if you heard one like this:

I’m the candidate who can take credit for adding nearly 14,000 American workers in the past year and supporting an industry that has experienced an astounding 27 percent job growth since 2010. I’m creating highly skilled, domestic jobs that pay well. I’m the U.S. solar industry and I approve this message.

After a grueling and largely negative campaign season, this is the kind of positive message Americans want to hear. And it is backed by fact, not spin.

Today, my organization, The Solar Foundation, released its third annual National Solar Jobs Census, which found that the U.S. solar industry now employs 119,016 Americans. That’s an increase of 13,872 workers and a 13.2 percent employment growth rate over the previous year’s total. That’s a job creation record any candidate would love to run on.

Looking at these results more closely, Census 2012 found that installers led the way in job growth, employing 57,177 Americans as of September 2012 (a 17.5 percent increase over the revised 2011 figure). The installation subsector remains the largest employer in the U.S. solar industry, and continues to provide highly skilled jobs that, by their very nature, cannot be outsourced. The Census also found that much of the installer growth occurred at larger firms. This suggests that the U.S. solar industry is moving into period of consolidation and maturation that will ultimately make the industry more robust and stable.

Additionally, the Census found that the sales and distribution subsector experienced a 23.1 percent increase, now employing 16,005 Americans. Employment in ”other” solar jobs, primarily in research & development and finance, experienced the largest growth rate – 46.1 percent –  bringing the total for this composite category to 8,105 U.S. solar workers.

Unfortunately (though not surprisingly), not all of the findings in Census 2012 tell a happy tale.  As suggested by the failure of a handful of module manufacturers and the high-profile media coverage these closures received, the manufacturing subsector had the weakest showing in Census 2012 – shedding nearly 8,200 jobs over the period we studied.  At 29,742 solar workers, manufacturing still accounts for nearly one-quarter of solar jobs in the U.S., but many of the surviving firms are forced to subsist on razor-thin margins. The difficulties facing this subsector stem from increased global competition in module manufacturing, leading to a decline in component prices. This trend, however, has had a dual effect: putting a damper on job creation upstream, but feeding a boom in installation – and therefore jobs – downstream. In fact, employment gains in the installation sector were enough to single-handedly offset the job losses in manufacturing.

Read more

President Obama indicated yesterday in a press conference that a carbon tax is not high on his Administration’s priority list. Nor does the policy have much support from leading Republicans in the House of Representatives.

But with chatter about carbon taxes in both conservative and progressive Washington political circles growing into a serious bi-partisan conversation, influential players are chiming in with their support.

Speaking to Bloomberg News, oil and gas giant Exxon reiterated its support for a carbon tax yesterday. A spokeswoman for the company said that the tool could “play a significant role in addressing the challenge of rising emissions.”

“Combined with further advances in energy efficiency and new technologies spurred by market innovation, a well-designed carbon tax could play a significant role in addressing the challenge of rising emissions,” Kimberly Brasington, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mail. “A carbon tax should be made revenue neutral via tax offsets in other areas,” she added.

Exxon’s political action committee gave nearly $1.2 million to political candidates in the past two years, 93 percent of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Exxon is the biggest U.S. natural-gas producer. A carbon tax could boost demand for natural gas in U.S. power plants, as gas emits half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned to make electricity.

This is not a new policy stance. The company came out in favor of a carbon tax in 2009 so that it could point to something it did support while lobbying against the cap and trade program being considered in Congress at that time.

“As a businessman it is hard to speak favorably about any new tax,” said Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson in January of 2009. “But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach.”

Exxon appears to be sticking to its original position now that there are more serious discussions underway about how to price carbon.

Earlier this week, anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist said that swapping a carbon tax for a cut to the income tax might be acceptable to conservatives — a position that he has expressed before. However, Norquist walked those statements back a day later while facing pressure from the American Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel advocacy think tank supported by the Koch Brothers.

How did renewable energies of all kinds come to account for more than 25 percent of the power fed into Germany’s grid—compared to just 6 percent in the United States? A new series takes a detailed look at how Germany set the stage for an massive energy transition. [Inside Climate News]

With the expiration of the wind energy Production Tax Credit looming and the clock ticking rapidly away to the end of 2012, a bipartisan group of U.S. governors is urging Congress to act now to save jobs. [Renewable Energy World]

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that his administration has not done enough to combat global warming but said he hopes to begin his second term by opening a national “conversation” on climate change. [Associated Press]

BP said Thursday that it’s in “advanced discussions” with the Obama administration to settle criminal claims over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico blowout that claimed 11 lives and spilled several million barrels of oil. [The Hill]

After reviewing wave height data from Hurricane Sandy, the National Weather Service office in Philadelphia has determined that the wave heights recorded at two buoys — including one monster 32.5-foot significant wave height at a buoy near the entrance to New York Harbor — set records for the largest waves seen in this region since such records began in 1975. [Climate Central]

Colorado officials considering changes to rules on how far oil and natural gas wells should be from houses, schools and other buildings will have to balance concerns of not just environmentalists and residents but also industry groups, farmers and ranchers and real estate agents. [Associated Press]

If you thought ‘superstorm’ Sandy was bad, here’s a sobering thought: New York isn’t even a high-risk city when it comes to climate change. For that, head to Asia. [Financial Times]

The coalition’s green policy is in disarray after an undercover film revealed George Osborne’s father-in-law claiming that the chancellor is behind a Tory campaign to oppose commitments against climate change. [Guardian]

The European Union’s executive body Wednesday laid out new measures to restore the long-term credibility of its effort to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases through a carbon market, while acknowledging that its earlier proposals would do little to restore incentives to invest in clean technology beyond the short term. [Wall Street Journal]