GlobalWarming.org

“Biofuels made from left-overs of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global-warming in the short run, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration’s conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will combat climate change,” reports the Associated Press.  “A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline. . .the study says they won’t meet a standard set in a 2007 energy law to qualify as renewable fuel. The conclusions deal a blow to what are known as cellulosic biofuels, which have received more than a billion dollars in federal support but have struggled to meet volume targets mandated by law. About half of the initial market in cellulosics is expected to be derived from corn residue.”

This is disappointing, because cellulosic biofuels are far less destructive to the environment than traditional ethanol, which is a special interest boondoggle that harms the environment while enriching politically-connected companies at the expense of taxpayers, consumers, and hungry people in the Third World.

The Obama Administration has clung to ethanol mandates, backing them despite growing evidence that they increase world hunger and mortality, and harm the environment.

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Among social scientists, this is called an “unintended consequence.”  Below, I’ve excerpted the money quote, as reported by Greenwire’s Manuel Quiñones. Read the whole thing here.

“We’ve pulled way back on carbon capture [research and development],” said Kip Alexander, an executive at Babcock & Wilcox Co. He cited “the way the rules are being written, the rules are being made” for the strategic decision to scale back.”

The quote in the title comes from Laborers International Union of America president Terry O’Sullivan, a top union official, as reported today by The Washington Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay.

Here’s more outrage from O’Sullivan over the President’s decision to (again) kick the Keystone can down the road:

“Once again, the administration is making a political calculation instead of doing what is right for the country. This certainly is no example of profiles in courage. It’s clear the administration needs to grow a set of antlers, or perhaps take a lesson from Popeye and eat some spinach.”

Read the whole thing here.

In other Keystone XL news…

• Remember last week, when a group of 11 Nobel Peace Prize winners sent a letter to the President asking him to “do the right thing” and “reject” the Keystone XL Pipeline? It turns out that one of the signatories is a 9/11 Truther. Read all about it at Big Green Radicals.

• Larry O’Connor, over at The Washington Free Beacon’s Editors Blog, makes a great point about the allegedly dire direct environmental threats posed by the pipeline.

The U.S. portion of Keystone will consist of 1,078 miles of 30″ pipeline. Sounds like a major environmental issue, right? Not when compared to the already existing 2.3 million miles of pipeline already in the U.S. pumping petroleum, gas, and chemical products every day.

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Platts Energy Week with Bill Loveless: On yesterday morning’s Platts Energy Week with Bill Loveless, Platts Associate Editor Bobby McMahon reported that utility industry sources are claiming that “80% of the [coal-fired power] plants that were relied upon in the winter months will be shut down next year” due to the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, a.k.a. the “utility MACT.” If true, this is a big deal.

Up to twenty-five perfect of the nation’s coal-fired power plant fleet is set to retire rather than comply with the Utility MACT. Because these power plants are all subject to the same deadline, we’re talking about a wholesale shift in the electricity industry, occurring literally overnight. Somewhat troublingly, we don’t really know what to expect when the rule kicks in. EPA performed a reliability analysis of the Utility MACT, but the agency’s work was shredded by an informal analysis conducted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

McMahon’s interview, reposted below, is eye-opening, insofar as it demonstrates the looming uncertainty that now plagues the electric industry as a result of the Utility MACT. As McMahon tells Platts Energy Week, the pipeline network for natural gas is limited in many markets, particularly in the northeast. These logistical constraints, in turn, engendered natural gas scarcity during last winter’s ‘polar vortex’ events, which precipitated price spikes. In the face of exorbitantly priced (or even unavailable) natural gas, utilities turned to coal. Next year, that might not be an option.

Perhaps EPA could justify such a threat to electric reliability, if the agency was actually protecting public health. Alas, this is not the case. The direct justification for the Utility MACT is the protection of a population—pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen—that does not exist. Aware that this original rationale for the Utility MACT is extremely weak, EPA suggests that the regulation’s “co-benefits” render it cost-effective, but this data also is dubious.

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Read all about it at The Reflector.

As we’ve noted before, demand for electric vehicles is supported by a $7,500 tax credit. Because EVs tend to be green status symbols for the wealthy, these tax breaks are, in practice, regressive.

Evidence is mounting that the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations for coal-fired power plants are in disarray.

The agency is working on two separate rules: (1) the Carbon Pollution Standard for new coal-fired power plants and (2) Clean Air Act section 111(d) “guidelines” for existing coal-fired power plants.

The Carbon Pollution Standard was proposed in January, and would effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants. This gives you an idea of what EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy means when she talks about “flexibility.” Energy developers can either spend 500% more on a coal plant, by installing carbon capture and sequestration, or they can build a gas plant. The “choice” is theirs alone.

The Carbon Pollution Standard was announced in September, yet it wasn’t until January that the rule was published in the Federal Register. In between, it was subject to an interagency review coordinated by the Office of Management and Budget. During this review, OMB asked EPA a very simple question: What is the rationale for promulgating the Carbon Pollution Standard?

Here’s EPA’s answer,

On June 25, 2013 President Obama issued the “Presidential Memorandum — Power Sector Carbon Pollution Standards” directing the EPA to issue a new proposal by no later than September 20, 2013 and to issue proposed carbon pollution standards, regulations or guidelines, as appropriate, for modified, reconstructed and existing power plants by no later than June 1, 2014. By statute, in order to issue emission standards for existing sources, the Agency must first propose standards of performance for new sources.

This is an amazing response. EPA basically concedes that the only reason it issued the Carbon Pollution Standard (for new power plants) was so that it could get to regulating existing power plants, in accordance with the President’s climate policy. That is, the Carbon Pollution Standard is merely a means to an end. And because there is no genuine purpose for the rule, other than to beget a subsequent rule, EPA had to fabricate a rationale out of whole cloth, which is really hard to do. I detailed the rule’s many mortal flaws in a post earlier this week, “The Top 6 Reasons EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard Is Illegal.”

Yet there has also been a spate of news raising doubts about the implementation of the agency’s 111(d) guidelines to regulate greenhouse gases from existing coal-fired power plants. Yesterday, for example, Politico’s Morning Energy reported that there’s confusion regarding the rule’s timing at the highest ranks of the Agency.

Per Politico,

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Former President Jimmy Carter and nine other Nobel Peace Prize winners this week called upon President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to “do the right thing” and “reject” the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Nobel Laureates’ open letter, published in Politico, is worth reading because it epitomizes the intellectual poverty of the anti-Keystone faction.

Asserting that Obama and Kerry’s stand on Keystone XL will “define” their “legacy” on climate change, the Nobels claim that rejection of the pipeline would (1) “have meaningful and significant impacts in reducing carbon pollution,” (2) “pivot our societies away from fossil fuels and towards smarter, safer and cleaner energy,” and (3) “signal a new course for the world’s largest economy.” Wrong on all counts.

As Cato Institute scientist Chip Knappenberger shows, using an EPA climate model, even under the totally unrealistic scenario that all Keystone crude is additional petroleum that would otherwise not be extracted from Canada’s oil sands, running the pipeline at full capacity for 1,000 years would add less than 1/10th of a degree Celsius to global warming. Climatologically, Keystone XL is irrelevant.

The Nobels might reply that the pipeline’s emissions are not the issue. According to them, Keystone XL is the “linchpin for tar sands [oil] expansion,” hence approving the pipeline would commit the world to a “dangerous” development path while rejecting it would move the world towards a new, cleaner path. Okay, time for a restatement of the obvious.

The U.S. economy is in the midst of a revolution in unconventional oil and gas, and the global appetite for oil and gas is growing by leaps and bounds. These trends are determined by basic economic and technological realities, not by a political decision about one infrastructure project. The Nobels’ conceit that Keystone XL is a “pivot” for the global economy and, thus, for the climate system is a reversion to the magical thinking of children.

The Nobels assert that, “The myth that tar sands development is inevitable and will find its way to market by rail if not pipeline is a red herring.” But alternate delivery via rail is not a myth, it’s a massive and growing reality. Maybe before writing to Secy. Kerry, the Nobels should read the State Department’s Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) on Keystone XL, especially Chapter 4: Market Analysis.

As in the 2011 Final EIS and 2013 Draft Supplemental EIS, State again concludes that “the proposed Project is unlikely to significantly affect the rate of extraction in oil sands areas (based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenario).” A big difference, though, is that whereas the 2011 and 2013 reports “discussed the transportation of Canadian crude by rail as a future possibility,” the FSEIS “notes that the transportation of Canadian crude by rail is already occurring in substantial volumes.” Indeed, from January 2011 through November 2013, rail transport of Canadian crude to U.S. refineries increased from practically zero barrels per day (bpd) to 180,000 bpd.

The completed Keystone XL Pipeline is estimated to have a capacity to deliver 830,000 bpd of crude oil. According to the FSEIS, rail-loading facilities in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) are already “estimated to have a capacity of approximately 700,000 bpd of crude oil, and by the end of 2014, this will likely increase to more than 1.1 million bpd.”  [click to continue…]

According to Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times, there’s been a “technological revolution” in the energy industry, one that “many people don’t know about.” This unnoticed upheaval in the electricity market, per Krugman, was prompted by “the incredible recent decline in the cost of renewable energy, solar power in particular.”

Here’s his proof:

The [IPCC] notes that “many RE [renewable energy] technologies have demonstrated substantial performance improvements and cost reductions” since it released its last assessment, back in 2007. The Department of Energy is willing to display a bit more open enthusiasm; it titled a report on clean energy released last year “Revolution Now.” That sounds like hyperbole, but you realize that it isn’t when you learn that the price of solar panels has fallen more than 75 percent just since 2008.

I readily understand why no one knows about this “revolution,” because it exists only in Krugman’s mind. His evidence is a single Energy Department talking point and an imprecise statement from a recent IPCC report, neither of which tells us anything about the relative cost of renewables compared to conventional energy. There is, moreover, no mention of any countervailing facts, like the bankruptcies of rooftop solar power manufacturers Solyndra and Abound. And he utters nary a peep about the astronomical costs of utility-scale solar like the Ivanpah project in the California desert. Krugman also maintains total radio silence about the intermittent nature of solar energy, which renders it non-dispatchable, and therefore virtually worthless from a reliability standpoint. Perhaps most telling of all, the inequality crusader ignores the fact that solar is the energy of choice for the 1 percent; taxpayer and ratepayer solar subsidies are regressive.

In any case, Krugman is demonstrably wrong. Solar panels remain expensive relative to conventional energy, which is why the industry’s fate is wholly dependent on political favoritism. More to the point, it is absolutely incorrect to compare solar, a non-dispatchable electricity source, to conventional energy sources that can be relied on 24/7 at a moment’s notice. It’s apples to oranges.