Energy

India Coal Tax to be Used for Carbon Sinks and Clean Energy Technology

This is how you are supposed to do it.  Via the Hindu, Indian Finance Minister Mukherjee’s Budget uses carbon charges to combat climate change: The [tax] slapped on coal in last year’s budget will help pay for schemes to protect and regenerate forests and clean up polluted sites announced in this year’s Budget. Finance Minister Pranab …

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Great Sources on the BP Oil Spill

The National Commission has added some valuable additional material to its cite: A multi-media resource, especially useful for students and journalists. For those who want to dive deeper, the Chief Counsel’s report is a great resource. It presents a good deal of evidence unfavorable to BP, but also significant criticism of Transocean and Halliburton. Of …

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Judge Feldman is still mad

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. You may remember Judge Martin Feldman from his decisions last summer enjoining enforcement of Interior’s first effort at a deepwater drilling moratorium, and more recently declaring that the Department must pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs in that case because it was in contempt of the injunction order. (For my take …

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Counting the cost of coal

The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School has a new report sort of out on the life-cycle costs of coal production and combustion. I say “sort of” out because the only document I’ve been able to find is a brief summary, without methods or references, posted by Ken Ward at …

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Putting Cooperation Into Cooperative Federalism

When federal law tells a federal agency to consult with the states before issuing its rules, what is the agency obliged to do?  Is it enough to allow the states to file comments on a proposed rule, or to invite their representatives to speak at a public hearing?  According to the recent Ninth Circuit Court …

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Not Enough “Green” to be Green?

The Washington Post has details about the budget proposal.  Here’s the information on EPA: President Obama’s proposed budget provides $9 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency, noting that that amount represents a $1.3 billion decrease from the previous budget year. But that’s unlikely to satisfy Republicans in the House who are sharpening their knives to …

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The World in 2050: Economics and Resources

This is a second post on Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050.  I posted previously about demographic projections, but the economic and resource projections are also notable.  Here are some important ones: Conventional oil is at or near its peak.  Remaining oil will be increasingly expensive to obtain. Even with improved efficiency, India …

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Obama’s 80% “Clean” Energy Goal: Ambitious or Inevitable?

In a recent post on Grist, Keith Schneider found President Obama’s 80% “clean” energy goal rather incredible: Arguably the central provision of President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was the proposal to generate 80 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean energy sources by 2035 — including nuclear energy and “carbon capture and …

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Good for Consumers, Good for the Planet?

California Governor Jerry Brown’s appointment of Mike Florio, a well-known, life-long consumer advocate, to a seat on the California Public Utilities Commission raises an interesting question for those who view the world primarily through green-colored glasses.  What does a consumer advocate have to offer toward the advancement of an environmental agenda – at least in …

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California Environmental Blueprint: Environmental monitoring & modeling

This post is the second in our ongoing series on our Environmental Blueprint for California. In our Blueprint, we recommended that Governor Brown establish an independent, statewide agency or council devoted to compilation, modeling, prediction and presentation of environmental quality data. I want to elaborate on what this agency might look like and why we believe …

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