Tonight in Taylorville, Illinois, the Department of Energy will hold the first of 3 field hearings on the environmental impact of FutureGen 2.0, America’s biggest boondoggle.
If you are unacquainted with FutureGen, it was George W. Bush’s marquee energy initiative, a $1 billion public-private partnership to build a coal-fired power plant that “captured” greenhouse gas emissions and piped them underground for storage.
President Bush proposed the project in 2003, but the Congress initially was skeptical. In 2005, the House Appropriations Committee rejected Bush’s request for FutureGen funding. Members called it a “maybe” program, too risky to merit the investment.
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The head of General Motors, Dan Akerson, has called for an increase in the gasoline tax of up to one dollar a gallon. Akerson’s proposal illustrates, in a nutshell, the perversity of the federal government’s fuel economy standards for new vehicles.
The program is known as CAFE (for Corporate Average Fuel Economy). CAFE has been criticized on several grounds: it limits consumer choice; it jacks up the price of new vehicles; it forces new fuel-saving technologies to be rapidly employed without adequate testing; and, worst of all, it increases traffic fatalities by forcing cars to be made smaller and lighter, reducing their crashworthiness. CAFE’s advocates claim that the law saves consumers money in the long run by reducing their gasoline costs, but if that’s true then we wouldn’t need a federal law imposing these technologies on the public.
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An article in yesterday’s UK Mail.Online provides another stark reminder of the inexorable law of unintended consequences. “California’s attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk,” writes reporter David Gardner. [click to continue…]
“Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?” in The Vancouver Sun
It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.
Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
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In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) issued an alarming warning that global warming would displace 50 million people, so-called “climate refugees,” by 2010. Last April, the UNEP was humiliated when the Asian Correspondent published an article, “What Happened to the Climate Refugees?,” noting how, from 2005-2010, populations increased in the very areas of the world that the UNEP had claimed would suffer the largest losses of people due to climate change. Shortly thereafter, the UNEP removed mention of “50 million climate refugees” from its website, and told the German periodical der Spiegel that it wasn’t responsible for the statistic.
You’d have thought the United Nations would have learned its lesson, but it’s back for more. Over the weekend in Oslo, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres unveiled the “Nansen Principles,” a set of guidelines to address the purported problem of climate refugees displaced by natural disasters supposedly caused by global warming.
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He’s baaaack. T. Boone Pickens. In 2008, his “Pickens Plan” sounded like the solution to our energy problems and would have filled the Midwest with wind farms—backed up with natural gas-fueled power plants. At the time of his self-promoted plan, the price of natural gas peaked. He likely did quite well with his natural gas investments. He went away, and his idea of farms filled with wind turbines was forgotten.
But he’s back with a new spin: television ads and media appearances promoting, once again, natural gas use—this time in America’s fleet of trucks. With high prices at the pump and Middle East unrest, the 2011 Pickens Plan sounds good. Using natural gas for transportation fuel is, as the Natural Gas Vehicles for America (NGVA) ad posted on his website states: “clean, less expensive, and right here.” It seems hard to argue with and dozens of congressmen have signed on to the plan known as the NAT GAS Act (New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions) or HR 1380.
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Obama’s Funny Math on the Auto Bailout
John Berlau, National Review Online, 6 June 2011
The Electric Car Albatross
Eric Peters, American Spectator, 6 June 2011
Study: Rising Forest Density Offsets Climate Change
Alister Doyle, Reuters, 6 June 2011
Overestimating Wind Generation
Lisa Linowes, Master Resource, 6 June 2011
The Real Cost of the Auto Bailouts
David Skeel, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2011
Oklahoma last week became the latest State to launch high profile litigation against the Environmental Protection Agency. The subject of the Sooner State’s lawsuit is the Regional Haze provision of the Clean Air Act. For a Regional Haze primer, click here. Suffice it to say, Regional Haze is an aesthetic regulation meant to improve the vistas at national parks, not a public health standard meant to protect human beings. Also, it affords States a uniquely large discretion among Clean Air Act provisions.
In late 2010, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission approved a Regional Haze implementation plan that would switch fuels from coal to natural gas at six power plants. Fuel switching is a drastic response, especially for an aesthetic regulation, but it wasn’t good enough for the EPA, which is demanding that the switch take place 10 years sooner. If not, the EPA is requiring pollution controls that would increase electricity prices in Oklahoma by 10 to 12 percent.
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Get with the Plan
In The National Review, T. Boone Pickens again makes the case for The NAT Gas Act of 2011. I slept through the first few paragraphs (the piece began with a constitutional argument).
There isn’t a whole lot of new information in here, its more of a response to the ongoing attacks on the legislation. He reminds us that Americans get all antsy when gas prices go up, but when prices drop again we are lulled back into indifference.
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