Articles by David Roberts

Energy storage, emissions hotspots, waste-to-fuel, and feed-in tariffs again

• I wish I was as funny as The Editors.

• Interesting: AEP, one of the most coal-heavy and change-resistant utilities on the planet, is experimenting with backyard energy storage systems.

• A good piece from the Center for Progressive Reform examines the risk of "hotspots" in a carbon cap-and-trade program. Of course there's no such thing as a carbon hotspot, but facilities that create carbon also tend to create co-pollutants, so it's a legitimate fear. Author Shana Jones has some ideas for how cap-and-trade could be crafted to avoid this danger.

• Ontario recently instituted a feed-in tariff program. What happened?

So many local wind and solar developers -- as well as homeowners looking to install photovoltaic panels -- applied for Ontario’s standard offer that the government’s 10-year target cap of 1,000 megawatts was exceeded within a year.

Said one energy analyst, "The lesson is that renewable energy technology was a lot more market-ready than the energy planners thought it was." Golly, I wonder if that's true in the U.S. too?

• Biofuels Digest has an interesting report on the promise of "waste-to-fuel" companies, which take municipal solid waste -- i.e., garbage -- and make biofuel out of it:

Smart infrastructure, courts v. coal, and energy efficiency all over

• The Wall Street Journal has a long and fascinating piece that expands the "smart" conversation beyond the grid to discuss smart infrastructure generally, including smart transportation and smart water infrastructure. Turns out information technology can help out all sorts of places!

• Largely unnoticed by the media, EarthJustice won a big victory in court recently:

A federal court has ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must close a loophole that -- for more than 25 years -- has made it easy for mining companies, coal ash dumps, and a host of other polluting industries to skip out on costly cleanups by declaring bankruptcy. The case concerned EPA's failure to issue "financial assurances" standards that ensure that polluting industries will always remain financially able to clean up dangerous spills and other contaminated sites.

• Homebuyers are starting to specifically request green, energy-saving features.

• PBS recently did an excellent hour-long documentary on "clean coal" called Dark Energy: The Clean Coal Controversy. You can watch the whole thing online at the linked site.

• This is pretty cool: the first zero-emission research station in the Arctic. Nice video:

New Greenpeace report details path to clean energy

Greenpeace has just released an important report called "Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable U.S.A. Energy Outlook." It details how the U.S. can cut greenhouse gas emissions without using nuclear or coal.

The report finds that off-the-shelf clean energy technology can cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels by at least 23 percent from current levels by 2020 and 85 percent by 2050 (equal to a 12 percent cut by 2020 and an 83 percent cut by 2050 from 1990 levels) -- at half the cost and double the job-creation of what it would take to meet U.S. energy needs with dirty energy sources.

Throughout, the study makes conservative assumptions to ensure the real-world viability of the scenario. The report assumes that only currently available technologies will be used and no appliances or power plants will be retired prematurely, and adopts the same projections for population and economic growth included in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook.

Here's a video of Sen. Bernie Sanders discussing the report:

I'm going to read the thing before I say anything else about it.

It is conservatives, not environmentalists, who want to redistribute costs and burdens — to future

In a boilerplate 'winger column on cap-and-trade, the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel says that Obama's carbon policy, despite all the rhetoric about reducing emissions and preventing climate change, is secretly just an effort to REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH [bwa ha ha, etc.].

In a similarly boilerplate 'winger column on climate change, Dan Gainor (The Boone Pickens Fellow at the Business & Media Institute -- wonder what T. Boone thinks about this) says that no matter what environmentalists say about "science" and "public health" and so forth, their secret agenda is to CONTROL PEOPLE [evil laugh].

These are very, very common conservative charges against environmentalists. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find 'wingers saying anything else on the subject. So it's worth addressing briefly.

Now, as Jason Grument said in response to Strassel's column at the Eco:nomics conference, any government policy redistributes resources: cancer research, invading Iraq, loosening regulations on banks, food stamps, carbon policy, anything. That is the nature of government. The relevant question is whether it's a wise or just redistribution of resources.

But it's important to go beyond that. Lurking behind these attacks is a bedrock conservative faith: that absent government intervention, the market allocates resources with perfect efficiency and those within it are free. Anything government does effectively disturbs a state of grace. Conservatives wouldn't put it so bluntly, but it's the only thing that makes sense of their rhetoric.

So it's worth occasionally reiterating: right now, with respect to climate, we are allocating resources inefficiently and imposing enormous costs and constraints on future generations. We are making them less free -- controlling them, you might say. Environmentalists do not want to control people for the sake of controlling them. They want people to bear the costs and burdens of their own behavior instead of sloughing them off to their kids and grandkids.

Conservatives think running up this enormous ecological and economic debt is "freedom." They think its proper distribution of resources. That's twisted and irresponsible.