Latest Articles

Exxon: Not the only profitable energy biz last quarter

ExxonMobil keeps making profits — another record one this last quarter — in the midst of meltdown everywhere else. But we here in New England had energy profits of our own: Coop Power, the regional renewable energy coop, had its first profitable quarter since it launched a couple years ago due largely to the number […]

NYT suckered by ExxonMobil in puff piece titled ‘Green is for Sissies’

Another nail in the coffin of the "liberal media" meme. The NYT has run a greenwashing press release from the oil giant masquerading as a major business news story. Yes, the print headline really is "Green is for Sissies," but as you’ll see, it isn’t some kind of postmodern Onion-esque irony (except maybe unintentionally). Here […]

BLM opens land near Alaska’s Bristol Bay to development

Some 2 million acres near Alaska’s Bristol Bay will be opened to development for the first time under a plan released Friday by the Bureau of Land Management. The agency’s decision to throw the door open for mining and drilling in the area, which is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, is opposed […]

Upstream carbon prices will not substantially change downstream carbon-emitting behavior

With apologies to Little Milton. Good news: With the incoming Obama administration, we are finally going to get some sort of a greenhouse gas (GHG) bill. Bad news: We are still having an inane, economically uninformed conversation about GHG policy. Many of the ideas that pass for Serious GHG Policy are silly, not because they […]

Obama and McCain make nice and possibly talk climate and energy

Obama and McCain got together this morning in Chicago for their first post-election meeting, in which they discussed what they could work on together going forward. As many noted prior to the meeting, it’s likely that climate change and energy concerns came up, as Obama had said on the campaign trail that these might be […]

Will Democrats take the votes but ignore the voters in increasingly powerful Northern Virginia?

Northern Virginia voters solidified their reputation Nov. 4 as a virtual factory for Democratic victories. Collectively, the Virginia suburbs of D.C. broke for Obama in numbers exceeding 60 percent. The margin is comparable to such liberal bastions as California and New York. Given the results, and given that 1 in 3 Virginia voters now lives […]

Gulf War syndrome exists, says scientific panel

Gulf War syndrome, an umbrella term for a batch of neurological disorders experienced by nearly a quarter of the 700,000 veterans of the 1991 war, is attributable to “neurotoxic exposures,” a scientific panel told Congress on Monday. The report specifically points to a pesticide and anti-nerve-gas drug commonly used by the soldiers. The federal government […]

NASA against offshore drilling

“It just makes it more difficult to fly. For safety reasons, we don’t want to be flying rockets anywhere near these things.” — Keith Koehler, public affairs specialist for the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, explaining NASA’s opposition to offshore drilling rigs off the Virginia coast

Obama talks energy on 60 Minutes

President-elect Obama was interviewed on 60 Minutes last night about the election and how he is preparing for the presidency. Obama noted early in the conversation that he’s “talking to top economic advisers about how we’re gonna create jobs, how we get the economy back on track and what do we do in terms of […]

NYT gets goofy on cap-and-trade

An NYT piece on Obama’s priorities manages to get two things wrong on energy policy, both in a short section written by John Broder. First, the overall point is wrong. Broder tries to draw a contrast between "an earlier proposal," Obama’s cap-and-trade program, and what Obama is "now emphasizing," big investments in renewables, energy efficiency, […]