As pessimists on climate change are fond of reminding us, China and India are catastrophically prolific builders of coal-fired power plants these days. While we’re busy greening the Emmy Awards, they are quietly doing what they feel they need to do to provide energy for their expanding economies, more than compensating for all of the West’s cute anti-warming efforts by increasing the gadrillions of tons of carbon they release into our shared atmosphere. But new carbon burying tech might help them not be so destructive.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co has just issued a report saying that even without government funding, the technology for trapping the carbon emitted by coal plants and burying it might pay for itself by 2030. China and India probably won’t throw themselves into the new tech whole-heartedly at first, because it looks like it will add about a billion euros to the initial cost of building each new plant. But the EU has stepped up by ordering a slew of trial models built by 2015.
Of course, there’s the small problem of the rich West having already created a horrendous climate situation. Not the best dynamic for pressuring an ascendant China into good stewardship. We’re basically the parent that just got thrown out of Betty Ford trying to get junior to put down the vodka. I think that might have been what happened in Postcards from the Edge.
Image: flickr/thewritingzone
The Democrats have been gradually retreating from their anti-off-shore-drilling stance ever since polls started to indicate that drilling is a winning issue for the GOP. Now they’re transitioning into all-out surrender. The bipartisan “Gang of 10″ congresspeople pushing for an energy bill that includes off-shore drilling has become the Gang of At Minimum 20. Even Pelosi has said she’ll let the oil companies drill near the southeastern US (far from her own California).
Pelosi has also been trying to find a way to partially salvage this apparently FUBAR piece of legislation. And she is being appropriately sneaky in her proposed compromise. Which is: in return for the ability to excavate for oil off-shore, oil companies have to contribute billions to the development of non-oil energy sources (wind, solar, etc). That allows America to try to fuel itself insofar as possible, but still forces Big Oil to contribute to its own obsolesence.
And the GOP can’t really oppose that aspect of a bill without looking completely in the pocket of Big Oil. Has that ever stopped them? Not that I know of. But it will at least force them to take the bait and lose face.
Image: flickr/barbwire55
There is much speculation about how Obama should go after Sarah Palin. If he goes after her resume—she was mayor of a town of 7,000, then the governor of a state of 680,000—that leaves him open to the absurd but potentially effective argument that these credentials are superior to those of a senator. If he goes after her evident backwardness or unusually conservative religious beliefs, the gun/bikini photo, the never traveled anywhere thing—well, we know how the clinging to guns and religion thing went over.
It seems to me you say, she thinks the melting of arctic ice isn’t caused by humans. She thinks polar bears aren’t endangered. She doesn’t think Exxon should have to pay up. All those non-radical conservatives in Colorado, Ohio, and Nevada care about this. (See this recap of her record so far). It’s not a personal attack, and it’s not just a reiteration of the tired McCain administration = Bush administration charge.
It’s just a way of making the effects of her ignorance concrete. She’s not just a smiling hick in a bathing suit holding a gun by a pool. She’s a smiling hick in a bathing suit standing on a melting iceberg.
Image: flickr/Chesi – Fotos CC
A California company, OptiSolar, is teaming up with Pacific Gas & Electric to build a solar energy plant near San Luis Obispo, CA, that will produce more energy than all the extant solar plants in the US put together.
That still isn’t as much as one would like. At peak sunlight, it’ll generate as much power as a coal plant or a small nuclear plant. But since it isn’t always peak sunlight out, all told it will generate about a third of what a coal plant would. Let’s not get depressed here. Utilities just need to build a ton more of them.
An example of the private sector finally stepping up and displaying serious environmental stewardship? Christ no. PG&E is doing this because they’re desperately trying to meet California’s unusually demanding state green laws, which ask utilities to draw at least 20% of their power from renewable sources by a deadline in 2010. PG&E may well still fail to meet it, as the solar panels might not be fully operational until 2011.
Companies aren’t going to stop pretending market-based solutions are the way to get them to do good things. But this latest development should be deployed by enviros as a rhetorical weapon to establish tougher laws that bludgeon them into doing more. This just isn’t going to be a voluntary process. Coercion is green.
Image: flickr/mararie
When I was a teenager, my mom lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, and my dad lived in New York City. I was a Northeast Corridor kid; I’d get on the Vermonter at the one-room 19th-century train station in downtown Amherst, or the impersonal post-apocalyptic one in nearby Springfield, and emerge into Penn Station with my most “urban” outfit on, hoping to pass.
The bummer of it was, it took at least five hours, and often more than six. By car, it was three and a half. The train showed up late, or it got stuck in New Haven for an hour switching power sources, or it had to slow down between Palmer and Windsor Locks because of track repairs. The sandwiches were sub-Quizno’s muck. There were a lot of empty seats.
Now Amtrak—the Northeast corridor in particular—is blowing up. Gas prices, blah blah blah. Congress is considering more than $30 million in new funding. As crappy as our national financial situation might be we should do it; this is our chance to become more of a rail society, in which trains run on time and the food isn’t bilge. This may be a pipe dream for now—Amtrak estimates it needs a billion dollars for track and bridge repairs alone—but if we could pull it off in a few years we’d be doing ourselves a favor foreign-oil-consumtion wise by getting cars off the road.
I’ve got the new slogan, by the way, congress. Amtrak: Not Just for Children of Divorce Anymore.
Image: flickr/jpmueller99
It would be easy to feel deflated today. Obama’s expressed a new willingness to accept some offshore oil drilling. McCain’s been gaining a little traction in polls, narrowing the gap to maybe 3 points, maybe zero, and part of it may be his aggressive advocacy of new drilling (offshore and in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) to lower gas prices. On the face of it, not the most inspiring bits of news.
The happy flipside: the polls also show that energy is the top issue for voters, ahead of Iraq. That’s a stark contrast with 2004, when large swaths of the nation obsessed over gay marriage even as the war became a full-on disgrace. The upside of every American getting whaled in the head with $4/gallon gas every week is that as a result the electorate is actually thinking about the most important issue. When was the last time that was the case? 1944?
Image: flickr/416style
Yesterday, congressional Republicans killed a Dem oil-drilling bill dead. Bush said earlier this week that he’d veto it if it came to his desk, so the Dems needed two-thirds of the vote and couldn’t get it. The bill would have made oil companies like the ultra-profitable Exxon explore for oil on land they’d already acquired before they started drilling on un
explored land.
The Republicans took an evil-looking position servicing their great donor, the energy industry. But they were able to get away with it in terms of PR fallout because all they had to do was say, “you really want to mess with where people can drill for oil when gas is at $4/gallon?” Democrats tried to get them with a “use it or lose it” motto. It’ll be interesting to see how each party tries to use the gas-prices issue to bludgeon the other this election year.
Image: flickr/Kanaka’s Paradise Life
Toyota has yet to verify the story, but the Japanese financial daily Nikkei is reporting that we’re going to start seeing Priuses tricked out with solar panels at some point in 2009. The reported solar panels won’t drive the engine or anything, but they may power the AC, which does seem like a good idea because one would assume some there would be some kind of correspondence between the power of the sun in any given location and the need for air-conditioning. LA = engorged panels, strained AC.
An unnamed source inside the company is quoted saying the panels are largely symbolic; you can’t power much with a solar panel, and they’re expensive to make, in part due to the rising cost of silicon.
As far as symbolic gestures go, however, it’s a pretty sweet one, the opposite of Reagan tearing the solar panels off the White House when he moved in. Putting a solar panel on the absolute latest, possibly only-in-Japan model of the hot car is like holding up a big sign saying “Solar is High Status.” And that’s an important step toward making reduced emissions a central part of keeping up with the Joneses.
Image: flickr/Beth and Christian
It used to be that when Americans drove into Northern Mexico for a couple hours, it was to undergo ill-advised surgeries. Now, sometimes, it’s to fight with each other over Mexico’s cheaper, state-subsidized gas pumps. Mexican border towns are already problematic places to hang out. Drug-gang violence has been escalating to the point where the number of tourists and party people slipping over the border for fun is way down. But American gas-seekers have been making it worse, according to a story in Reuters. They’ve been competing with each other and the locals for places in line at gas stations, getting into brawls in two-hour lines, to the point where local Mexican authorities have started talking about rationing gas. It’s well worth their while from a financial standpoint — with fuel prices up to $4.50 per gallon in Southern California and Southern Arizona, they can save up to $100 per month.
Depressing? Sure! But also, perhaps, necessary. This is probably what needs to happen on a global scale before most consumers will choose to buy cars with better fuel efficiency, avoid driving so much, and otherwise reduce their fossil fuel consumption. Humiliation is a powerful instrument of change; maybe some of those border-crossers from LA will start to fantasize about an expanded subway system. In the long term, these high fuel prices are mostly a good thing.
