Climate Climate & Energy

Is ‘ethanol’ short for ‘laundered coal’?

Wow! Now that the caucuses are safely behind us, an Iowa paper notices that "ethanol" is how corporations and troglodyte utilities pronounce "laundered coal," AKA, The Enemy of the Human Race.

Specifically, 300 tons a day, per plant. Here's an Orwell-Award winning statement for you:

Officials with Alliant Energy, which has proposed a new coal-fired plant in Marshalltown, told the Iowa Utilities Board recently that if Iowans want renewable energy, they will need more electricity from coal plants.

Apparently if you don't want coal you need to use more of it. QED.

Alaskan village sues Big Fossil Fuel over link to climate change

The tiny village of Kivalina, built on a barrier reef in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against 24 oil, coal, and power companies, alleging that Big Fossil Fuel’s greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to the climate-change-caused coastal erosion that threatens the village’s very existence. Kivalina says that the companies should pay for its relocation. […]

Wow

Aside from being substantively misleading, this is just really, really awful. Doesn’t CEI have enough money to hire a video editor?

Conventional energy vs. renewable energy

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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As all eyes turn toward Texas this week in advance of the Democratic primary, we will see a state that is beginning its transition to a new energy economy. Texas is grappling with a shift the entire nation faces -- and as usual, it's doing it on a big scale.

When it comes to energy and to carbon emissions, Texas is a place of superlatives and contrasts. It has more solar, wind, and biomass resources that any other state; but it's also No. 1 in total carbon emissions.

It is the ancestral home of Big Oil, but it also hosts the world's largest wind farms. It has a very successful renewable energy portfolio standard, but it also has two nuclear power plants in the pipeline to provide power to its rapidly growing population.

A year ago in a watershed deal, a private equity firm working with environmentalists arranged a $45 billion buyout of the state's largest power producer, TXU. As part of the deal, eight of 11 planned new coal-fired power plants were cancelled. However, as many as nine new coal plants remain in the pipeline.

In Texas, we see a contest between conventional and renewable energy resources, and between the past and the future.

Solar photovoltaic cells are quite eco-friendly, says research

Are photovoltaic cells truly easy on the earth when manufacturing is factored in? If the question’s been keeping you up at night, rest easy: According to a solar-cell life-cycle analysis to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they are.

South Fla. power outage

There’s seems to be some confusion out there about exactly what happened in South Florida today, but as far as I can tell, some power lines went out at a substation, which caused a nuclear plant to automatically shut down, which caused power outages for upwards of 3 million people. Nice grid. I liked this […]

Notable quotable

“I have the same feelings about wind as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” — financier and oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens

EU-27 emissions down 8 percent since 1990

The European Environment Agency (EEA) reports:

Total greenhouse gas emissions in the EU-27, excluding emission and removals from land-use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF), decreased by 0.7% between 2004 and 2005 and by 7.9% between 1990 and 2005.

Over the same period, 1990 to 2005, U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions are up an alarming 17 percent (PDF). The EEA report underscores a point I have made repeatedly -- the transportation sector remains the toughest nut to crack:

Notable quotable

“Anybody can talk and beat up coal: They don’t like it; it’s dirty; it does this and this. But I can assure you, they’re not going to turn their lights or their demand for energy off.” — Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia

EPA staffers warned Johnson he might have to resign if he denied Cali’s waiver

Stephen Johnson. Lordy. Not only did Stephen Johnson’s staff at the EPA oppose his decision to deny California’s waiver, but they warned him that if he denied the waiver he might have to resign in shame. Boxer’s EPW committee has gotten ahold of some internal memos and briefings from the EPA. To pick just one […]