CleanTechnica

The recently much touted alternative “energy only” bill would not cost fossil industries, but instead would cost taxpayers $13.9 billion a year, according to this scoring by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office – that has been gathering dust since September. This failing grade from the CBO has received no publicity at all. I can’t imagine why, can you?

The bill would authorize a total of $48.6 billion over the first three years. It would add $13.5 billion each year to the deficit.

Renewable energy would share $10.4 billion of the $48 billion with electricity supply and electricity delivery funding (or a little over $3 billion a year for renewable energy).  Nuclear energy would get $5.2 billion a year, and $5.5 billion a year would go to fossil energy. The remaining $27 billion would be allocated to science programs.

The bill has no self-funding mechanism.

By contrast, revenues created by the cap and trade component in the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (CEJAPA) would actually fund its renewable energy component, and leave some extra ($21 Billion a year) according to the Congressional Budget Office scoring in December.

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In an attempt to step up pressure on the developing countries to take up ambitious emissions reductions and forcing them to move to renewable energy sources for power generation, a high ranking US official has written to the World Bank recommending it to stop financing coal-fired plants in the developing countries.

In a letter written to the World Bank, the United States Executive Director at the World Bank Group, Whitney Debevoise said that multilateral development banks like the World Bank have the responsibility of building a financing framework that ensures mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and strengthens the developing countries economies against climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

Mass transit is often associated with limitations. People have to plan when they leave based on when their bus, streetcar, light-rail, or commuter rail line leaves. They don’t have the ‘pleasure’ of circling around a parking lot trying to find the spot closest to the front door. They can’t easily stop off at McDonald’s for a healthy bite to eat. And so on.

Well, those things may provide a little bit of limitation, but there are other factors that can give you more freedom as well.

For example, the average transit rider in the US now saves $9,242 a year by riding transit (approximately $770 a month). I could think of at least a few things to do with $9,242! Things I couldn’t do without it.

In New York, you can actually save about $1,147 a month or $13,765 a year. The top 20 US cities in average savings are listed below.

But there are more benefits to riding transit, too.
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We know that dozens of billions of US dollars go to imported oil every month (nearly $1 billion a day). We know that some of that must go to unstable, unsafe countries.

A new report by the Center for American Progress titled “Oil Dependence is a Dangerous Habit” shows exactly how much oil we are getting from several such countries, and the results leave you wondering how safe we actually are and how serious we are about fighting terrorism and hostile political regimes.

The ironic thing to me, is that the companies so gung-ho about being patriotic and so critical of almost all clean energy efforts are the same companies who are giving so much money (see the graphs below) to these unstable countries.

Ten of the countries who we import a lot of oil from are also on the State Department’s Travel Warning list: Algeria, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

Some leading importers may not be on the prestigious Travel Warning list, but show very anti-American foreign and energy policies as well.

Venezuela, one of our top five oil providers, is quite anti-American, if this Washington Post article is any indications of how the country thinks of us.

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We’ve heard of coal powered electric power stations having to be shut off in extended drought conditions – like Australia has had for the last decade – because the water needed to run the power plant is even more needed simply for drinking water supplies.

Today, in news from China: electric power is in danger of being shut off due not to hot weather, but to cold weather.

Any time coal reserves go lower than three days, coal-fired power plants must shut down. Eleven percent of the key coal producing provinces’ power plants are close to getting to that point. Coal reserves at power stations are in dangerously short supply.
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The first round of federal ARPA-E funding for future energy kick-started a stunning range of 37 different projects last year, from fuel-secreting bacteria to liquid batteries and a way to create solar energy by mimicking photosynthesis.  Now the agency has launched a new round that narrows the target down to just three carefully defined areas.

ARPA-E is the federal agency created by Congress in 2007 to propel the U.S. into a new energy future, whereupon the previous administration promptly allowed it to languish.  That was then, this is now: breathing life into ARPA-E has been a top priority of the Obama administration.  To introduce the new round of funding ARPA-E has called for the U.S. to move away from fossil fuels and “change course with fierce urgency,” so let’s take a look at how that goal dovetails with the new target areas.

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Diesel pollution from the shipping industry should be expected to soar in the near future as shipping traffic increases, but the U.S. EPA has just taken an important step toward nipping the emissions trend in the bud.  On December 22 the agency announced that it has finalized a tougher rule for engines and fuel on U.S.-flagged ships, bringing this country in accord with more sustainable international standards.

The new rule is part of an overall effort to reduce diesel emissions and other forms of air pollution along the coasts of Canada and the U.S.  It is an early Christmas present for port cities, which are most directly affected by diesel emissions from ships.  It is also expected to have a positive impact on air quality in inland areas as well, affecting millions of U.S residents.

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Their global disinformation campaigns designed to keep world populations ignorant about the danger of climate change have not endeared the fossil industry to the rest of us. The refusal to deal with the facts about the danger to humanity that global warming poses makes it easy to also dismiss their lies about “clean coal”.

Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence that recent serious attempts at research and development into trying to make coal clean should be taken seriously, and not disregarded as simply more lies to be automatically dismissed.

If energy could be extracted from coal without mining it while reducing its carbon dioxide emissions 75%, then that is R&D worth following, along with all the new developments in clean renewable energy.

Research from a new study from the Clean Air Task Force has led to a project just begun this summer in the Alberta oil sands by Swan Hills Synfuels to try just that. Read the rest of this entry »

You can put a fork in a gigantic new coal fired power plant proposed for rural Sugard, Utah, because it’s done.  Yesterday the Utah Supreme Court struck a major blow against the plant by ordering it to start back at square one in the pollution permit application process.

As reported by Paul Foy in an Associated Press story, the do-over exposes the pie-in-the-sky mentality behind so called “clean coal.”  Among the reasons for the court’s decision was the failure of regulators to look into gasification, a cleaner coal technology.  They went along with Nevco, the company behind the plant, which proposed a more polluting conventional pulverized-coal burn method because gasification was too expensive.  In other words, without some big help from some deep pockets, clean coal is a no go.

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The trickle has turned into a torrent: following close on the news that a Michigan utility has converted a power plant from coal to sustainable biomass, Progress Energy Carolinas just announced that within the next seven years it plans to retire 11 coal-burning power units at four sites.

Progress Energy Carolinas is a subsidiary of Progress Energy, which is far from giving all of its fossil fuel operations the old heave-ho.  However, the move is still significant and Progress is no small potatoes.  It’s a Fortune 500 company with more than 3 million customers in three states, and the eleven units represent a huge chunk (about 1/3) of its coal-fired power generation fleet in North Carolina.  With friends like these, coal doesn’t need any enemies. Read the rest of this entry »