oil
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‘Stop using so much oil’
A great little story today in Tom Rick's Inbox, from the Washington Post's military correspondent:
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BP joins ‘biggest global warming crime ever seen’
The tar sands are rightly called one of the world's greatest environmental crimes, as I've written. No company that invests in the Canadian tar sands can legitimately call itself green.
Yet BP, the oil company that lavished millions on advertising its move "Beyond Petroleum," announced this month it's putting $3 billion into this dirtiest of dirty fuels!
BP is buying a half-share of the ironically named Sunrise field:
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Some Arab countries have passed the U.S. in per capita oil consumption
A fascinating and important article was the lead story in Sunday's New York Times:
The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast ... several of the world's most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.
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San Francisco sues over oil spill, South Korea spill cleanup ongoing
The city of San Francisco has sued the owners of the container ship that hit the iconic Bay Bridge last month and blackened the bay with 58,000 gallons of oil. The “wholly avoidable” accident caused “more injury to the San Francisco Bay Area than we can yet begin to fathom,” says the suit, which seeks […]
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Greed versus green on the energy bill
This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
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As the new energy bill hit the Senate with a thud last week, we had to ask: Is it really so easy to stall vital public policy with tired old scare tactics? Last Friday, the answer was "yes."
One of the potholes the bill has encountered is its $13 billion take-back from Big Oil. The bill proposes to repeal tax breaks given to the industry by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2004-2005 and to close some tax loopholes that allow oil companies to game the system when they report income from foreign oil and gas extraction.
Predictably, the oil industry and the White House complained about a tax increase and warned of higher prices at the pump -- two time-tested themes to trigger knee-jerk opposition from the public.
Let's break it down.
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Bartlett opposes energy bill over RFS
I’m a fairly enthusiastic supporter of the energy bill that just left the House, but I am painfully aware that the Renewable Fuel Standard, which would mandate (insofar as one can mandate ponies) 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2036 — and worse yet, 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol by 2015 — is a […]
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The global nature of global warming
This is my formal rebuttal to Brooke Coleman (director of the Renewable Energy Action Project), specifically to comments found in Tom Philpott's latest corn ethanol article. I'm using my access to the bully pulpit to pull it out of comments, like I did the last time a corn ethanol enthusiast joined the discussion.
Welcome to the best environmental blog on the planet, Brooke. You don't seem to have a very high opinion of this community, but maybe you'll warm up to us. I don't speak for the whole community of course, I'm just one of the many who come here to learn and engage in reasoned debate.
You seem to think that anything is better than oil. But believe it or not, in the real world, we sometimes have to pick between the lesser of two evils, at least until something better comes along.
Plowing under the world's remaining grasslands and forests to grow industrial agrofuels dwarfs the damage done by oil spills. What happens when you take grain off the world food market and stuff it into American gas tanks? I'll tell you. Someone somewhere on this planet takes advantage of the high prices to plant more of it to fill the hole in the human food chain. Where is the arable land they need to do that? It is under an existing carbon sink or has another crop on it already. The second leading cause of global warming is deforestation. How hard is that concept to understand? Global warming is global. What we do here screws everybody.
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Necessity is the mother of invention … and some really bad ideas
Mein Gott. I was so hoping that this article was from The Onion or something. Porta-nukes will power oil-shale melters, because there's just no topping the American spirit -- the willingness to take a truly abysmal idea (oil shales) and make it worse:
