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Coca-Cola announces big recycling initiatives

Speaking around gulps of carbonated, corn-syrupy beverage, Coca-Cola executives announced two environmental initiatives this week. By next year, the company plans to redesign its 20-ounce bottle to use 5 percent less plastic, and will open a gigantic recycling plant in South Carolina. Coca-Cola currently recycles or reuses about 10 percent of its U.S.-sold plastic bottles; […]

The coal industry’s rush to build new plants is bumping up against reality

One thing the coal industry seems to get, but that isn’t yet common public knowledge, is how fragile it is. It’s a filthy relic of the 19th century and a rational society with a free and open energy market would have ditched it already. It has survived almost purely based on inertia — its stranglehold […]

Strict safety guidelines cause construction delays at nuclear plants in Finland and Taiwan

Bloomberg has a very long article on the troubles plaguing Finland's Olkiluoto-3, "the first nuclear plant ordered in Western Europe since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster."

The plant has been delayed two years thanks to "flawed welds for the reactor's steel liner, unusable water-coolant pipes and suspect concrete in the foundation." It is also more than 25 percent over its 3 billion euro ($4 billion) budget. The article notes:

If Finland's experience is any guide, the "nuclear renaissance" touted by the global atomic power industry as an economically viable alternative to coal and natural gas may not offer much progress from a generation ago, when schedule and budgetary overruns for new reactors cost investors billions of dollars.

The U.K.'s Sizewell-B plant, which took nearly 15 years from the application to build it to completion, opened in 1995 and cost about 2.5 billion pounds ($5.1 billion), up from a 1987 estimate of 1.7 billion pounds.

Nuclear power's costs balloon partly because plants must be built to more exacting safety standards and stand up to more stringent oversight, leading to lost time and extra expense.

Indeed, the oversight is needed because so many plants have safety-related construction problems:

It’s time to stop accepting the claim that we ‘can’t’ switch to renewable energy

This started as a response to Michael Tobis in this thread, but seemed worthy of moving to its own post. Photo: pcesarperez Michael said: "I started by defending sequestration on the grounds of the conventional wisdom that renewables do not seem adequate for the whole energy picture …" This is a common refrain. You frequently […]

Researchers suggest virus may be culprit in honeybee deaths

Honeybee populations continue to die off in large numbers, and theories as to the cause abound: Climate change? Genetically modified crops? Cell phones? New research adds another theory to the list: Israeli acute paralysis virus.

Reporting from a coal hearing of the House Select Cmte. on Global Warming

If you dream of a near future in which coal mines are abandoned, coal workers are employed in emerging green energy fields, coal executives are feeding at the trough of welfare assistance (and not corporate welfare), and China and India are all too happy to buy our clean technologies at a healthy price ... well, then it's good you didn't attend this morning's hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change.

I'll be posting a few entries here detailing the most significant ground Markey's hearing covered. But the nickel version is that, though everybody from the governor of Wyoming to the wonks at the Center for American Progress think a cap-and-trade program is inevitable, they also think that many, many billions of dollars in subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration technology will be crucial to any greenhouse-gas reduction strategy.

Which is to say that I had a rollicking and hilarious morning!

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 […]