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Oprah to save Appalachia with her mighty army of suburban moms?

If Oprah does a segment on mountaintop removal mining, Big Coal is f**ked.

Is consensus on 'energy gap' enough to get past disagreement over climate change?

As you've likely noticed, comments are turned off here at Grist, as we transfer to our shiny new site. If you have thoughts on this post or anything else, email them to me at droberts at grist dot org.

I think Andy Revkin gets something importantly wrong in this post on DotEarth -- which gets back to one more point I wanted to make about the Eco:nomics conference.

Andy's post is about how the cranks at the ongoing Heritage climate "skeptic" conference agree with climate realists that there's an "energy gap" and a need for substantial energy innovation. So we can all move forward together!

Now, I think on a broad level this is true. You don't have to take climate change seriously to see the need for big changes in our energy situation -- you could be concerned about national security (quite common), concerned about dwindling fossil fuel reserves (less common), or concerned about stagflation brought about by high energy prices (weirdly rare). John McCain, back in his Reasonable Conservative phase, used to make the same point: even if we're wrong about climate change, we should do this stuff anyway.

But how far does this agreement get you? Far enough for a shared political or economic agenda?

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed

The ChiPs are down for the hydrogen highway cul de sac -- literally. The future Ponches and Jons of the California Highway Patrol won't be policing the hydrogen highway.

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed. This dream was embraced and elevated by President Bush, who said in his January 2003 State of the Union address:

With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free.

I have explained at length many times why the first car of child born in 2003 -- or the last car, for that matter -- will not be a hydrogen fuel cell car, most notably in my best selling book, The Hype About Hydrogen [Note to a picky semantic people: The book was not a best seller, but it was the best-selling of all of my books]. Maybe my best (and certainly my most widely read) paper available online [PDF] is "The car and fuel of the future," published by Energy Policy back in 2005. It is still worth reading if you want to understand why plug in hybrids, not hydrogen fuel cell cars, are the car of the (near) future.

The last vestiges of a hydrogen economy are collapsing. First, we had Honda's new FCX Clarity, which the company optimistically billed as "the world's first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production." If so, the Clarity has demonstrated to the world how distant the whole enterprise is (see here, here and here).

Now Greenwire ($ub. req'd) has a long story on the collapse of another one of the few remaining pieces of the dream, "Has Schwarzenegger's hydrogen highway gone bust?" excerpted below:

Wolf Blitzer parrots right-wing talking points on global warming

Originally posted at the Wonk Room.

Last week on the Situation Room, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer parroted right-wing talking points on global warming. His program emphasized that Monday's climate crisis protest took place in the cold -- a talking point pushed by Sen. Jim Inhofe's (R-OK) office and global warming deniers from Glenn Beck to Nancy Pfotenhauer. He then followed the Heritage Foundation's reasoning to challenge Tony Blair on the urgency of establishing a cap on carbon pollution, asking if it is "wise" to "effectively impose a new tax on consumers" instead of dealing with "bread-and-butter issues":

At a time of this extraordinary economic distress, not only here in the United States but around the world, why go forward right now as a priority with all of these global warming related projects? It seems there are so many other key bread-and-butter issues literally on the table. ... Is it wise to go ahead, effectively impose a new tax on consumers right now, an energy-related tax, this uh, uh cap-and-trade if you will, to try to reduce carbon emissions right now? In effect that's going to be higher costs on consumers who use either gasoline or other electricity, forms of energy. Is that wise at a time of economic distress?

Watch it:

Blitzer summarized: "You say do it now despite all the economic issues."

Blitzer is missing a few key facts:

Population growth, climate change sparking water crisis: U.N.

PARIS — Surging population growth, climate change, reckless irrigation and chronic waste are placing the world’s water supplies at threat, a landmark U.N. report said on Thursday. Compiled by 24 U.N. agencies, the 348-page document gave a grim assessment of the state of the planet’s freshwater, especially in developing countries, and described the outlook for […]

What stops us from acting more boldly on economic and environmental policy

[Note: Since comments are turned off, if you have thoughts, email me at glipow AT gmail.com. ]

A lot of energy is expended on Grist showing that good environmental policy is good economic policy -- to show that green pays. But it is just as important to show the same thing from the other direction. Economic policy will only pay if includes strong environmental features. Let's look at the current responses to our economic crisis from that perspective. We'll start by comparing what we are doing as compared to what we should be doing, and then move on to explaining the difference.

Let's start with the economic stimulus package that was just passed. It is not nearly big enough. It was structured on fighting a smaller unemployment rate than we already face, let alone the rate at which unemployment will peak. Those radical leftists in the World Bank are noticing that the recession is worldwide, which would indicate a deeper recession than Obama's stimulus was intended to fight. Though you would not know it from the corporate media, quite a number of respected economists predicted from the beginning that this was too small a stimulus. Even intelligent conservatives are starting to say we need a second, bigger stimulus.

Where to put the money from a second stimulus? Keeping public transit going, which otherwise loses subsidy revenue during downturns, gives a double return in not only saving jobs and demand that would otherwise collapse, but also reducing oil use, greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion. In general, making up for losses in state and local revenues reduces pro-cyclical job losses that otherwise make a recession worse.

But we have good reason to consider long-term investment in infrastructure as well. Much necessary infrastructure spending is "shovel-ready." For example, suppose we decide to put $450 billion into upgrading our freight rail system to move 85 percent of long-haul trucking miles to rail? We can invest immediately into the planning this will entail. And we can stockpile parts and materials we know this upgrade will require. And we can implement already proposed unfunded short-term projects that will be needed components of such an upgrade: new switch yards, new freight yards, and various other log-jam breaking proposals.

Sen. Sanders says Obama is committed to climate action

WASHINGTON — One of the U.S. Senate’s top campaigners against global warming on Wednesday sought to ease international concerns, vowing President Barack Obama was committed to action on climate change. Some European nations have voiced uncertainty about whether Obama and the U.S. Congress can follow through on promises to force sharp reductions in carbon emissions […]

Pickens: 'You don't want to turn it over to the greenies'

The billionaire oilman and Swift-boat-smear funder T. Boone Pickens is a hard man for anyone to like these days.

His traditional political allies -- rabid conservatives, fossil fuel companies -- could not possibly be more opposed to his current agenda of pushing clean energy, especially a massive ramp up of wind power (see here and here).

Yet he really doesn't try that hard to reach out to progressives who might be his allies, as indicated by the headline quote from his talk at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom in DC yesterday, reported in "The Beautiful Wind of T. Boone Pickens," by snarky Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Still, his general lack of interest in a progressive agenda should be a surprise to no one (see here).

I do take exception with Milbank's brief foray into energy policy:

But while there are quibbles over the particulars, parts of the Pickens Plan are -- or should be -- uncontroversial: a new transmission grid to move renewable power, better energy efficiency, and using natural gas as a "bridge" fuel to power trucks and fleet vehicles until alternatives become more plentiful.

I don't see why using natural gas as a transportation fuel on the scale Pickens wants "should be uncontroversial."

AEP wants rate increase to make up for revenue loss

Remember when Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, said this?

[he] said "I'm not a decoupler. If my revenues go down, they go down."

The West Virginia arm of his utility is now asking for a series of rapid rate increases: 18.5 percent this year, 14.5 percent next year and 13.2 percent in 2011.

Why, pray tell?

In part, because:

The company had predicted it would sell $248.5 million in power to other electric utilities between July 2008 and this June, but those sales have almost disappeared. Revenue generated from those sales -- electricity unused by AEP customers -- keeps rates down.

So if AEP's revenues go down, they go down. But then they file a three-year, double-digit rate increase to make up for lost ground. "Not a decoupler" indeed.

Brace yourself

"The turnaround will probably come faster than people expect, and the supply won't be there."

-- Deloitte energy adviser Joseph Stanislaw, on what industry analysts expect to be a sharp rise in oil and gas prices