BP Deep Water Horizon Oil Commission Takes on All Sides
The Presidential BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission released two new reports yesterday, on the effort to stop the spill and anotheron whether response and clean up technology has kept pace with technology developments for exploration. The reports continue a really impressive pattern emerging from the Commission: taking on hard questions, devoting significant staff resources to addressing those questions and issuing readable, thoughtful an...
CONTINUE READINGBuidlings and Energy Efficiency — Just Being New Isn’t Enough
Newer buildings in California put more of a strain on the electric grid than do older buildings. That is the apparent conclusion of a new paper written by Howard Chong through UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas. The strain comes in the form of a greater “temperature response” – an increase in temperature on a hot day will have a more dramatic effect on electric consumption in a home constructed after 1970 than in an older one. A higher temperature respo...
CONTINUE READINGActual Conservative Climate Change Policy!
After all the talk over the last two weeks, here it is: Fresh off a big victory over the GOP establishment on earmarks, conservative GOP senators are opening up a new front in the battle on government spending that could be similar to the earmarks standoff: They are calling on Congress to let billions in ethanol subsidies expire. Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, two leading conservative Senators who have pushed the GOP to be serious about its anti-spending rhetoric, ...
CONTINUE READINGMeltwater gourmet — just perfect
This isn't quite law and policy, but some stories capture an era perfectly and I can't resist. This one strikes me today: A guy from Newfoundland, who lost his former livelihood as a seafood broker when the cod fishery collapsed, now turns to selling melted iceberg water. He bottles it in glass, ships it around the world, and sells it for $10 a bottle or more. Will prices increase or decrease over time? On the one hand and in the very long term, icebergs will...
CONTINUE READINGThe Perks of FERC’s Work
Last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a ruling that could have a profound effect on the amount of small and medium-sized solar energy generation that states can achieve. Called "distributed generation" or "localized generation," this type of renewable energy has tremendous potential to be generated from the rooftops of our existing buildings and infrastructure. Probably the best policy to encourage distributed generation is the "feed-in ta...
CONTINUE READINGDim Bulbs
Incandescent bulbs may be a waste of energy and money -- but as Politico reports, if you're against them, you're a socialist: Hoping to counter attacks from his right, Rep. Fred Upton is promising to reexamine a controversial ban on incandescent light bulbs if he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Michigan Republican told POLITICO on Thursday that he's not afraid to go back after an issue he once supported but that has come under withering a...
CONTINUE READINGSo much for “consensus climate solutions”
Our friend Jon Adler has taken many of us and most progressives to task for not pursuing "consensus solutions" to climate change. What might these consensus climate solutions be? Well, Jon insists that it would look something like a revenue-neutral carbon tax (such as is proposed by the superb Carbon Tax Center) instead of a "big government solution" like Waxman-Markey. I'm quite sympathetic to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Unfortunately, Jon's allies on the right...
CONTINUE READINGA poor grade for California’s new Rigs-to-Reefs law
Ever gaze up from a Southern California beach and wonder about the fate of the oil and gas rigs dotting the horizon? Fellow blogger Sean Hecht has just published, with UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, an assessment of California's new law governing "rigs-to-reefs" conversions--and suggests that lawmakers have much more work to do to get rigs' fates right. AB 2503 authorizes the State, for the first time, to consider allowing oil and gas d...
CONTINUE READINGClimate Change and Providential Irony
Jed suggests that "the belief that climate change can’t be real because God made the earth for us to use is just one instance of a deep and old American practice of enlisting nature to uphold our cultural and political identities – to prove that the world is made for people like us." That may be what people believe, but if so, they have a lousy definition of their own relationship with God. The world can indeed be made for "people like us", but that hardly implie...
CONTINUE READINGWhose Nature? God, the GOP, and Everyone Else
Some Americans say they don’t believe in climate change because they believe in God – or, more exactly, because of what they believe about God. A few weeks ago, the New York Times quoted some Indiana Tea Party activists who explained that, because the world was created for human use and benefit, using its mineral wealth couldn’t possibly be harmful. Then a Republican would-be Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee turned out to believe that Noah’s ...
CONTINUE READING