Yesterday’s UK Guardian reports that a “special meeting” of the United Nations (UN) Security Council is “due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.”
This was inevitable. With the Cold War many years behind us, and only a few important regional wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) going on, the Security Council needs some kind of permanent, global crisis to justify its existence. Mission Creep thy name is Climate Change. [click to continue…]
Yesterday, I excerpted some key facts and figures presented by Acting EIA Administrator Howard Gruenspecht at a Senate Energy and Commerce hearing on the future of natural gas. Today I summarize some of the main points presented in testimony by MIT Professor Ernest Moniz. [click to continue…]
In a previous post, I bemoaned the fact that hydraulic fracturing, the technological breakthrough in natural gas production also known as “fracking,” has spurred a frenzy of rent-seeking.
By significantly expanding America’s natural gas supply in a short duration, fracking has ushered in a period of low prices. This makes natural gas more competitive relative to other energy sources. As a result, the industry is in a great position to add market share in the electricity sector. Now that $3+ gasoline is the new normal, the natural gas industry also is well-situated to gain a foothold in the transportation fuel sector. The opportunity is there, but major gas producers have been unwilling to rely on their price advantage to better compete. Instead, they’ve been trying to secure political favors. As I noted in the aforementioned blog post,
Today, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on “The Future of Natural Gas.” There were no partisan or ideological fireworks. The expert witnesses were Howard Gruenspecht (U.S. Energy Information Administration), Ernest Moniz (MIT), and George Blitz (Dow Chemical).
Moniz argued the environmental risks associated with natural gas were “challenging but manageable.” Blitz sounded a note of caution. Industry uses natural gas both as a feedstock and as a manufacturing fuel. Policy-driven increases in natural gas demand due to, for example, a Clean Energy Standard, EPA’s Utility MACT Rule, or tax incentives for natural gas vehicles could do what high gas prices did in the early 2000s — close factories and offshore jobs. I may blog on their testimonies later on.
Gruenspecht’s testimony provides a valuable primer on natural gas production, demand, reserves, and trends. This post excerpts some of the key facts and figures he presented.
A collective cry of outrage could be heard across the D.C. urbanista interwebs upon the announcement that Ward 6 D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells would be losing his chairmanship of the Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee. Unfortunately given the political dynamics (read: lefty-enviro-urban-fetishists have way too much pull in this town!), less is generally more when it comes to transportation policy in Washington, D.C. Wells, in addition to being an anti-gambling nannystater, is well known for being behind many of the District’s wasteful, anti-auto “livability” programs. His official website’s tagline is even “Building a livable, walkable city.” For a brief explanation of why the New Urbanists’ social-engineering concept of “livability” is just code for “stupid handouts to yuppies,” see my recent post on OpenMarket.org regarding the federal Department of Transportation’s TIGER 3 grants program.
As the anti-mobility, pro-gentrification-subsidy Greater Greater Washington laments (as I rejoice), this decision is worsening the already low morale among the District Department of Transportation’s most worthless bureaucrats. Chief trolley and bike-share cheerleader Scott Kubly, who announced he will be leaving his post at DDOT, doesn’t appear to have been driven out as a result of Council Chairman Kwame Brown’s committee shakeup. But this latest departure of a Fenty-era apparatchik is making clear that much of the city is sick and tired of local politicians basing transportation and land-use policies around the silly prejudices concerns of wealthy gentrifiers. Ex-Mayor Fenty’s education policy was fingered by many in the clueless media as the culprit for his loss to now-Mayor Gray, as the awful teachers’ union contributed heavily to Gray’s campaign. But ask a resident of Ward 7 or Ward 8 about what annoyed them most about Fenty’s “white-washing”: “bike lanes” are usually at the top of the list.
While I am hardly optimistic about the overall future prospects of the notoriously corrupt D.C. city government, as an advocate for sensible transportation policy that actually enhances residents’ mobility and quality of life, recent steps taken by key city politicians are a breath of fresh air after years of official pandering to well-to-do urbanists.
America is a beacon of capitalism, so it can be jarring to discover one of its largest industries operates under the thumb of the state. As my colleague Iain Murray and I noted in National Review,
The $330 billion industry has been a redoubt of state control for almost 100 years. Early in the 20th century, pro-intervention Progressives concluded that electric companies would consolidate into “natural” monopolies that would exploit consumers. This was a curious conclusion to reach at a time when electric companies were competing vigorously in many cities, but for those who put faith in the regulatory state, theory trumps observation at every turn.
The Progressives’ remedy for this theoretical drift toward natural monopoly, offered without any apparent appreciation of irony, was to establish government-mandated monopolies. States created commissions with the regulatory power to outlaw competition among utilities and set electricity rates for consumers. By the end of the Great Depression, almost all Americans bought their electricity from government-backed monopolies, and they continue to do so to this day, whatever regulation advocates might say about electricity deregulation in the 1990s.
The upshot is that your utility is controlled by your local government, so it is only as good as your local government. With that in mind, Pepco’s status as the “most hated” company in America reflects poorly on politicians in Maryland, the utility’s primary service area.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently posted updated information on U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Some of the facts may surprise you.
More than half (51%) of all the oil we consume is produced in the USA. [click to continue…]
Major automakers’ production plans for electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) “are far below sales targets set by countries,” announced the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a press release accompanying the agency’s newly updated Electric Vehicle Roadmap report.
Major manufacturer production plans add up to 0.9 million units by 2015 and 1.4 million annually by 2020. In contrast, governments have set sales targets of 1.5 million units by 2015 and 7 million annually by 2020.
Evidently, policymakers have mis-underestimated (as a former President might say) market demand for EVs and PHEVs. The gap between production plans and political targets would be larger still without political props for those vehicles such as a federal tax credit up to $7,500 and billions in federal R&D support.
IEA believes more incentives and R&D — including coordinated federal, state, and local support for re-charging infrastructure — will do the trick. Now there’s a big surprise!
Yesterday’s edition of Greenwire features an amazing column on cellulosic biofuels by reporter Paul Voosen. It’s got interviews with leading researchers, industrial history going back to WWII, science, economics, and the narrative suspense of a detective story.
Voosen’s main point: Despite substantial private and public investment, there have been “no Eureka moments” in the “long U.S. campaign” to scale up Nature’s digestive processes (found in fungi and the guts of termites, cows, dung beetles, and other fauna) to break down cellulose and create affordable alcohol fuels from prairie grasses, wood wastes, and other fibrous plant materials.
President Obama is refusing accept deals that would raise the federal debt ceiling because they would require him to accept cuts in wasteful green-jobs and rail boondoggles and stimulus spending: “The president has made a bipartisan agreement even more difficult by declaring certain spending off-limits to cuts. Mr. Obama’s ‘untouchable’ list includes his $1 trillion health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, education and training outlays, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal, spending on ‘green’ jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements except further squeezing payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals.” If the debt ceiling is not raised, America’s credit rating may be downgraded, leading to higher interest payments on the debt in the future.
Obama’s refusal to reconsider green-jobs spending is unfortunate given how such spending has backfired, effectively outsourcing thousands of American jobs at taxpayer expense. ABC News reports on the subsidies for Chinese wind turbines contained in the stimulus package:
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org