Thousands of protesters gathered on the Washington’s National Mall on Sunday calling on President Barack Obama to reject the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline proposal and honor his inaugural pledge to act on climate change. Organizers of the “Forward on Climate” event estimated that 35,000 people from 30 states turned out in cold, blustery conditions…
Category: Energy
Democrats offer bill to curb Big Oil’s tax benefits | Reuters
Senate Democrats on Wednesday introduced a bill to eliminate billions of dollars in tax benefits enjoyed by big oil and gas companies, one day after President Barack Obama renewed his call for plugging tax loopholes in his State of the Union address. Obama and fellow Democrats for years have targeted oil and gas tax breaks,…
Big Coals Big Problems
If President Obama is to follow up on his inaugural promise – “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations” – that has to mean addressing those existing plants. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the president will…
New York Governor Announces $1 Billion Green Bank And $1.5 Billion Solar Program
In his State of the State address yesterday, Cuomo outlined plans for a new billion-dollar “green bank” to leverage private funds for deploying clean energy technologies, announced a 10-year expansion of the state’s solar program by increasing funds $150 million per year, and named a new cleantech czar to oversee the efforts. The cumulative impact…
46 Republicans Claim Wind Credits Are Too ‘Costly’ After Voting To Retain Billions In Big Oil Subsidies
The future of wind tax credits is still tied up in Congress as the clock runs down to extend the production tax credit for wind (PTC) expiring at the end of the year. This week, 47 House Republicans urged House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to let them expire. Although GOP districts hold 81 percent of…
Massachusetts’ Clean Economy Sees Massive Growth, Now Hosts 71,000 Jobs In Cleantech
Government investment and support for clean, renewable energy development is paying off handsomely in Massachusetts, where the clean energy economy grew 11.2% between July 2011 and July 2012. The state’s fast-growing clean energy sector now employs 71,523 people at 4,995 clean energy businesses across the state, according to a Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) report released Aug….
5 Ways the Obama Administration Revived the Auto Industry by Reducing Oil Use
In addition to the successful bridge loans there are five other major Obama administration policies that helped the auto industry and the nation by creating jobs, reducing oil use, saving families money, and cutting pollution: Fuel-economy and carbon-pollution standards for 2012 to 2016 model cars sparked job growth in automobile manufacturing and increased automobile sales….
Renewable Electricity Nearly Doubles Under Obama: ‘I Think They’re The Future. They’re Worth Fighting For’
Non-hydro renewable electricity generation has nearly doubled since President Obama took office, reaching 5.75 percent of net electricity, according to figures from the Energy Information Administration. In 2008, before Obama entered the White House, non-hydro resources like solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass represented just over 3 percent of generation. Today, they total nearly 6 percent….
The Networked Energy Web: How The Convergence Of IT And Energy Can Remake The U.S. For The Better
The American electric grid is the largest machine on earth, and has heroically served its purpose for many years: to deliver affordable, reliable energy with nearly universal access. One way of understanding the electrical system is as a “one-to-many” and fundamentally linear system. The electricity grid was built around large, centralized generation from power plants,…
How the U.S. manages to waste $165 billion in food each year
Each year, about 40 percent of all food in the United States goes uneaten. It’s just tossed out or left to rot. And that’s a fairly large waste of resources. All that freshwater and land, all that fertilizer and energy — for nothing. By one recent estimate, Americans are squandering the equivalent of $165 billion…
Wind accounts for one-third of new energy-generating capacity in US
In 2011, roughly one-third of the new generating capacity installed within the US was in the form of wind turbines, according to a new report prepared by the Department of Energy. That represents nearly seven Gigawatts of new wind installations. Although that leaves the nation a distant second to China (which installed a hefty 17.6GW),…
Iowa’s GOP Governor Blasts Romney Campaign On Wind Tax Credits: They Need To ‘Come Out Here To The Real World’
Now that Mitt Romney’s campaign has officially declared the candidate’s desire to kill tax credits for wind while maintaining tax credits for the mature oil and gas industries, Midwestern Republicans are not happy. Iowa Republican Representative Tom Latham said Romney’s decision “shows a lack of full understanding of how important the wind energy tax credit…
GOP Aims to Sink Navy’s “Great Green Fleet”
Even though House conservatives fought in May to prevent the Navy from spending any money on biofuel, the service last Friday launched its “Great Green Fleet”—the first-ever US flotilla to get underway with mostly non-conventional fuel. But election-year jockeying may mean an epic battle over biofuel in Washington this fall. The fleet—technically, an aircraft carrier…
Expect gas prices to fall below $3
Is it possible the average price at the pump could be below $3 a gallon by the time leaves begin to change? Absolutely, according to experts who follow fuel price trends, and some areas of Georgia have already broken the barrier. At one station in Macon on Friday, unleaded regular was selling for $2.90, and in Duluth and…
How Americans use energy, in three simple charts
Donald Marron passes along a very handy chart from the Congressional Budget Office looking at what sources of energy the United States relies on — and for what purpose: SOURCE How Americans use energy, in three simple charts – The Washington Post.
U.S. slaps tariffs on Chinese panels. Is this the end of cheap solar?
On Thursday, the Commerce Department ruled that China’s solar manufacturers are engaged in “dumping” — that is, they’re selling their panels for below-market rates in order to drive their competitors out of business. In response, the Commerce Department has slapped a 31 percent tariff on imports of silicon photovoltaic cells from China. That’s on top…
America’s Future Under ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
The promise of abundant oil jobs was dangled before us as an incentive—despite the fact that clean energy industries were some of the only sectors to show strong growth at the height of the Great Recession, and 3.1 million jobs in the United States were associated with the production of green goods and services in…
Wind-Generated Energy Is Working Well For Us in Iowa
The wind-power industry is an American success story that is helping us build our manufacturing base, create jobs, lower energy costs and strengthen our energy security. As a country, we should support energy diversity and development of all domestic resources, creating an “all of the above” energy strategy. To that end, our state and national…
Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core’s reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean — just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored — but it’s also open to the elements…
Big Oil’s Mighty First-Quarter Profits
Together the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, during the first quarter of 2012. Recall that these companies made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011, mostly due to high oil and gasoline prices. Their ongoing huge earnings mean that these…