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Washington state caps the cost to pollute, rather than the pollution

The Sightline Institute (formerly Northwest Environment Watch) picks up a Seattle P-I report on yet another counterproductive incentive: making it cheaper to pollute in bulk.

The more hazardous waste you produce in Washington, the better the deal you can get from the state. Companies that make chemicals, oil, paint, paper and airplanes must pay a Hazardous Waste Planning Fee for the toxic substances that they pump into the air and water or send to landfills. But because the fee is capped, the top five producers pay less than $8 a ton for their dangerous waste, whereas companies producing smaller amounts can pay up to $250 a ton.

Feds trying to boost native fish populations stock Colorado waterways with wrong fish

A 20-year effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore endangered native trout populations in Colorado would be commendable — if they hadn’t stocked some of the waterways with the wrong fish.

Alaskan senator invents new theory of global warming

Ted Stevens, the Republican senator whose vacation home was recently raided by the FBI, and who made over $800,000 from a shady real estate deal last year, has come up with a brand-new theory of global warming. He told a NBC reporter in Alaska:

We're at the end of a long, long term of warming, 700 to 900 years of increased temperature, a very slow increase. We think we're close to the end of that. If we're close to the end of that, that means that we'll start getting cooler gradually, not very rapidly, but cooler once again and stability might come to this region for a period of another 900 years.

This was Stevens' way of telling the villagers of Shishmaref, which is being washed away by rising waters despite the Army Corps of Engineers' construction of massive sea walls, that they're on their own.

It'll be interesting to see if the denialists at Planet Gore, so quick to attack anyone who dares make an issue of global warming, will leap to the defense of Stevens' claim, which as far as scientists can tell, appears to be a personal fantasy.

Startup says new technology will make gasoline obsolete

A battery-replacing invention that allows you to plug in your car for five minutes, then drive 500 miles without using gasoline? It sounds too good to be true, but Austin-based startup EEStor says they’ve done it. While the doubters are many, we’d have to agree with Georgia Tech researcher Joseph Perry: “I am skeptical, but […]

My testimony to Congress on liquid coal

Here's the inside skinny on yesterday's liquid coal hearing before the House Science & Technology Committee. It was four on two (NRDC's David Hawkins and me vs. the other witnesses). You can read my testimony here and all the witness statements here -- not that I would recommend doing so unless you are a serious liquid-coal junkie like me.

About 10 members of Congress were there at any given time -- about evenly split on how they view liquid coal. The ranking Republican on the full committee, Ralph Hall from the great state of Texas, interrogated me at length -- trying to get me to say that I was anti-fossil fuel, that I was pro-tax (or that a cap-and-trade system was the same as a tax), and that I never offered any solution to the global warming problem. I think I held my own.

The high price of electricity deregulation

In David Cay Johnston's NYT article "A New Push to Regulate Power Costs," he writes about the fact that many states are rolling back their deregulatory initiatives. The main reason, he says, is price.

Ahh, price. That magic number at the nexus of supply and demand. The problem with price in electricity markets is that it is not determined by supply and demand, as in a free, deregulated market -- even in those states where there was, supposedly, deregulation.

In fact, we've long argued that deregulatory initiatives, as they were designed and implemented, had nothing to do with what most people understand as "deregulation" at all. Johnston points out that retail price controls, artificially induced competition on the wholesale side, and same old-same same-old metering does not a free market make. As Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute says, "Just calling something a market does not make it a market."

A setback for Yucca Mountain nuke dump as judge denies water to project

A federal judge poured cold water on the U.S. government’s plans to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada this week — or, more accurately, he left the feds high and dry. The Department of Energy has been seeking 8 million gallons of state-controlled water to drill test holes at Yucca Mountain; […]

EPA sued over ship emissions, smacked over 9/11 cleanup

The Environmental “Protection” Agency faced two major slams yesterday, from east and west. In Washington, D.C., the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued a report scolding EPA for its post-9/11 cleanup efforts, saying the agency’s approach to toxic indoor contamination in buildings near the site is misdirected and ignores New Yorkers’ health concerns. The report “confirms […]

Penguin populations in trouble, climate cited as one cause

Photo: iStockphoto First, the good news: there’s an International Penguin Conference! Who knew? Now, the bad news: at said conference, taking place this week in Tasmania, a team of researchers has reported that the world’s penguins are in trouble. The 17 species “face serious population decreases throughout their range,” the team wrote, adding that officials, […]

ConAgra: No more toxic fake butter

Clearly not responding to my post from yesterday — but rather to steady pressure from the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy and other groups — ConAgra announced it would stop using diacetyl in its Orville Redenbacher and Act II microwave popcorn brands. Diacetyl, a fake butter flavoring, has been known for years to […]