Climate Climate & Energy
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The breakdown of Big Oil’s record-breaking profits
Record Big Oil profits from record oil prices and taxpayer subsidies -- where does all your money go?
With ExxonMobil's report of a $11.68 billion haul in the second quarter of 2008, the world's top five oil companies are now on track for more than $160 billion in profits this year ...
I know what you are thinking: Surely, Big Oil will take those staggeringly immense and almost immoral profits from the suspiciously fast rise in oil prices -- along with the $33 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies you're going to give those politically powerful and remarkably greedy companies over the next five years (see here) -- and invest in both new drilling and new energy technology. No it won't, no it won't, and stop calling me Shirley.
In fact, the AP reports:
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NYT Magazine swoons for Pickens
From the most recent New York Times Magazine:
As a Texas oilman and major contributor to the Republican Party, you've just launched yourself, at 80, into green stardom by devising an energy plan that relies mainly on wind power.
Green stardom. All you have to do is mention wind turbines to make the eyes of dirty hippies glaze over in delight.
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Los Angeles utility starts to squawk as it stares down a $700 million carbon bill
Regulators have won praise for speed and thoughtfulness with which they have laid the groundwork for implementation of A.B. 32, the landmark bill that aims to bring California's greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But even within a single state, climate change legislation creates winners and losers, and regional tensions are starting to show.
California's climate plan consists of a slew of new efficiency standards, regulations, and reduction measures -- as well as a cap-and-trade system to place a lid on total emissions. It's the cap-and-trade system that is part of the present pushback.
At issue in particular are the long-term contracts that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) has entered into for coal-based electricity. Although coal has kept L.A.'s electricity some of the cheapest in the state, the utility will have to pay enormous sums for carbon allowances under the new law.
It's always instructive to unpack some of the distortions that surround the politics of climate change legislation. Officials from L.A. seem to be trying out three different angles in their resistance to the bill. The first is that the steep cost of the allowances will divert money away from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
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Crusher credit: one of many savvy short-term solutions
In case you missed it, noted economist Alan Blinder made the case for a crusher credit in the NYT last week. The idea is to pay fair market value to buy up old, polluting cars. (If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece from a while back, you’ll remember that a fairly small core of […]
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Eric Roston on Colbert
Eric Roston, author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat, tells Stephen Colbert all about his favorite element:
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Florida utility’s green energy program died a predictable death
The sad fate of Florida Power & Light’s green energy program should be instructive. Of course the program had to spend a ton of money on marketing — it was asking ratepayers for charitable donations to a cause most of them weren’t familiar with and didn’t care much about. Given that most ratepayers weren’t eager […]
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Umbra on driving versus flying, again
Dear Umbra, Your recent answer to the plane/train question prompts me to ask something that has always bothered me but that my little old brain can’t figure out on my own. I know that planes are worse than other forms of transportation, but the plane is going to fly whether I’m on it or not. […]
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The jig is up
Mainstream news is catching on to Big Oil greenwashing:
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Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants
The effect of radiation is not a subject I blog on a great deal, although it is a subject I have studied a great deal. Indeed, my uncle, a former nuclear physics professor at MIT, started our family Radon testing business, which was sold off years ago.
I asserted that people should be worried about low doses of radiation, especially cumulatively over time. Charles Barton of The Nuclear Green Revolution commented, "Your low doses over time assertion has been repeatedly falsified by empirical studies." Quite the reverse is true. As the National Research Council's Committee to Assess Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (!) reported definitively three years ago:
