Third and final debate touches on environment and energy
There wasn’t much new ground covered in this third and final debate regarding the environment and energy policy. Some of the “highlights” include: READ MORE
Man-eating catfish goonch caught in India
Is this a freak mutation or a sign of “global weirding” to come?
Palin supports 2 wars and bailout but says paying higher taxes ‘unpatriotic’
Tom Friedman had a scathing critique of Sarah Palin in the NYTimes today.
Friedman takes the following statement by Palin in the debate with Biden as a starting point: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd [Palin] and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
From there, Friedman makes the following insights: READ MORE
Squeezing the last drops out of an archaic technology
Architecture2030.org, “a non-profit, non-partisan and independent organization… established in response to the global-warming crisis” posted this chart based upon projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that illustrates the share that oil derived from new offshore drilling could add to our overall supply. By now, it is no surprise that this amount is embarrassingly small– given the passion behind the “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
With that said, of course we’re not saying that the additional oil from new offshore drilling wouldn’t make any difference in our oil supply and consequential price–since as the chart beautifully shows–it would increase supplies by some amount. Instead, it is the misguided effort and passion that is going into the pro-drilling movement that is the waste. Instead of spending this time and effort on squeezing the last drops out of a twentieth century industry, we should be taking this opportunity to figure out how to master the twenty-first century industry–that being, clean technology.
For the take on this subject at the Republican convention, check out this video. Apparently Abe Lincoln wants us to drill too:
[Hat tips: Treehugger, Tom Friedman, and this jewel.]
Analysis of T. Boone Pickens’ interview with the LA Times
Our favorite wind farmer, T. Boone Pickens sat down with the LA Times last week for a great interview. We will paraphrase some of the highlights of that chat and add our own analysis here:
- Regarding the source of our high gas prices:
Pickens says, of the 85 million barrels of oil used by the world each day, the U.S. accounts for 21 million. Quoting him, “that’s 25% we’re using, with [only] 4% of the population and 3% of the reserves.” Pickens uses this fact to illustrate that it is not Exxon-Mobile or speculators to blame, but instead simply a situation where demand is outweighing available supply.
Regardless, the wildly disproportionate consumption of oil by the U.S. compared to our reserves further indicates the silliness of thinking we can drill our way out of this problem, as Pickens often notes, despite our politicians’ pandering on this issue.
- Regarding Al Gore and climate change:
Pickens indicates that while he believes that human caused climate change is occurring, that issue is on “page 2.” For Pickens, our dependence on foreign oil, to the tune of $700 billion per year, is on “page 1.”
Fortunately for good environmentalists and good patriots alike, for the most part, these two interests remain generally aligned, thereby permitting a win-win situation where we could both get off foreign oil and decrease the effects of climate change with the same plan.
- Regarding how we can enact the solution:
Pickens states, “I think that if Congress would do something like Eisenhower did in the Interstate highways - that is to say, an emergency, which it is. It’s like war, and we need to address it in a non-partisan way…. We have the vast resources of wind and solar, but the naysayers say wait a minute, solar isn’t there yet. Don’t worry about it; I have enough faith in America….”
This is where Pickens exhibits his most optimism, and we, and others, have the most apprehension. Congress has shown a complete inability to move towards a solution and there is a little indication that they are getting their act together.
- Regarding the development of the transmission lines and infrastructure necessary to move wind energy generated in the middle of the country to the east and west coasts:
Pickens says, “let the government do it. If they don’t want to, industry will do it. Industry will be quicker; you know that. We can get it done a lot faster…. You would be surprised how much you can get done in 10 years.”
However, if the task does fall on the private sector, the federal government would still be required to create the regulatory environment necessary to make the project economically feasible.
- Regarding people who say we should shift our vehicles to electricity instead of natural gas, as Pickens proposes:
Pickens indicates that he is in favor of the electric car, however the technology is not there yet to allow it to be a real solution. Instead, natural gas should be the bridge that we use in the short-term to get to a point where we can find a real lasting solution for clean cars. Basically, Pickens is saying we have a present danger, and need an immediate solution. In the long-term, he thinks we will transition our cars off of natural gas.
Describing this, he states, “You have to kind of accept that. You get people that say, well, I want to go to the electric car quicker. Well, the 700 [billion dollars per year] keeps ticking on you on the electric car. We’re not there on the electric car. Am I opposed? No I’m not opposed. I’m for electric; I’m for anything that gets that number down.”
- And regarding leadership:
“What’s been missing for 40 years is a plan. We’ve never had a plan; there’s no energy plan. And it all comes to the fact that it’s a leadership problem.”
Exactly.
Airline CEOs release open letter blaming oil prices on speculators
Yesterday, CEOs from some of the 12 biggest airlines in the country co-released an open letter to the public regarding the current state of fuel prices. While the letter mentioned conservation and increased production in one sentence, the main point of their message was to encourage increased regulation of market speculators, whom the airlines assert could be responsible for as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary increased costs.
While market speculators have recently been a popular target for politicians looking to appear responsive to the public’s concerns over high gas prices, it is not entirely clear that speculation is a major contributor to the current state of oil prices. T. Boone Pickens, billionaire oilman, and modern pioneer in the quest to develop renewable energy sources, asserts that investigating market speculators as the cause of the current state of oil prices is a “waste of time.” This is because, as Pickens explains, “you have 85 million barrels a day of oil available in the global energy market and 86.4 million barrels a day of demand. So the price of oil is going to go up until you can kill demand.”
In our opinion, regardless of whether speculators are a major factor in current oil prices, or not, the more focus that politicians and private leaders, like airline CEOs, place on them, instead of on conservation and development of alternative sources of energy, the more we miss the chance to make real changes. Instead of blaming “market speculators,” public and private leaders should be following the lead of Pickens, and taking positive steps (like his $10 billion wind farm in Texas) to actually decrease our reliance on fossil fuels.
The text of the letter from the airlines is copied below, and was signed by the CEOs of the following airlines: Northwest Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Midwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways.
Factcheck.org is great resource for analyzing candidates’ green claims
In past presidential elections, it was often difficult for the public to be made aware of misleading statements made by the candidates. The main check and balance was usually one’s opponent, who was often viewed by the public as equally biased. However, the nonprofit website factcheck.org solves this problem by taking an analytical look at some of the candidates’ most egregious claims. Given the important role the candidates’ position on the environment is going to play in this election, factcheck.org is a great resource, as it was last week in parsing through Sen. McCain’s recent claims regarding his green policies.
Upon a closer analysis, factcheck.org found that McCain made a series of misleading and inaccurate statements regarding the environment and his green policies last week.
Factcheck.org found that McCain:
“…said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling “would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis.” But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn’t have much of an impact on supply or prices until 2030.
McCain tried to paint Obama as an opponent of nuclear power, yet Obama has said he is open to nuclear energy being part of the solution and has supported bills that contained nuclear subsidies.
He has soft-pedaled the “cap” portion of his cap-and-trade proposal for greenhouse gases, even denying that it would be a mandate. The cap is a mandatory limit, however, and McCain even says so on his Web site.
McCain’s new ad, running this week, rightly says that he bucked his party in supporting action on climate change years ago. But its images of windmills and solar panels are misleading in that he supports subsidies for nuclear power, which isn’t pictured, and opposes them for wind and solar energy.
McCain continues to say that a suspension of the federal gas tax will lower prices for consumers, though hundreds of economists say he is wrong.”
While oil prices boom, refinery profits contract
Although some of our political leaders assert that in response to high gas prices, we should build more refineries, according to this article, some American refineries have chosen to cut their production over the last year in response to sharply decreased revenues. Contributing to this decrease in profit is the dramatic increase in the price refiners must pay for the oil they purchase that is then refined, coupled with a shrinking domestic demand for gasoline. (Domestic oil consumption has dropped by over 3% in the past year.) As a result, while the price of raw oil has gone up 100%, the cost of refined gasoline has increased only 39%. Consequently, refiners have decreased their production capacities by about 5-10%.
It seems to us that if the high cost of gas was due to insufficient refinery capacity, then the existing refineries would be operating at full strength right now. (Indicating a demand greater than existing supply.) However, this is not the case. If anything, instead of insufficient refinery capacity, there is probably insufficient competition amongst refiners. Maybe industry consolidation has created a situation where refiners can voluntarily decrease their production levels, instead of ramping up to meet existing demand? Collusion is not always announced (a la OPEC) and can instead result from a marketplace controlled by only a handful of companies that can implicitly behave anticompetitively.
Finally, if there isn’t sufficient domestic demand for gasoline to take up all of the existing refiners’ capacity, then how come every time there is a storm or fire at a major refinery, the price of gasoline spikes dramatically. With the standard caveat that we do not have an economic or energy policy background, this does not seem to jive. It seems to us that refiners, along with most other parties along the global oil supply chain, have too little competition, and therefore too little incentive to produce their product at full capacity.
High energy prices spur the reopening of old coal mines
With energy costs skyrocketing, old coal producing regions throughout the world have sprung back to life. In Japan, coal production is at its highest point in nearly forty years, after a long period of contraction due to high labor and extraction costs. With the world price of oil and other commodities at all time highs, re-opening old mines and the expansion of existing mines throughout the world has boomed. Illustrating the dramatic increase in prices, the cost of a metric ton of coal shipped from Australia to Japan in 2003 was $23.25. Now it is almost $140.
Of course, along with this increase in coal production and use, comes an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. While high oil prices has encouraged alternative energy investment and development, it is also apparently fueling old energy re-development. Hopefully this won’t prove to be a net-wash.
Comparison of the candidates’ oil and energy policies
Looking at this comparison by Reuters of the presidential candidates’ energy and oil policies, it is clear that Senators Obama and Clinton are proposing more aggressive legislation than McCain. Nonetheless, the good news is that all three candidates have significantly more pro-environmental policies than the current administration. So at least we know some change is on the way. Whether it will be enough to make a difference, we shall see.
Some of the highlights of the comparison:
On gas prices:
McCain and Clinton want to suspend the federal gas tax this summer.
Obama wants to temporarily stop filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
On fuel economy:
Clinton wants to increase average efficiency standards to 55 miles per gallon by 2030.
Obama wants to double the current standards by 2026.
McCain has not yet released a specific target but indicates he wants to decrease our dependence on foreign oil.
On biofuels:
All three candidates support dramatic increases in biofuel production and distribution.
Oil demand continues to rise while supply stagnates
Historically, when gas prices have increased, so has oil production. This is not currently the case. The New York Times has an article looking at this unique situation, where oil prices have recently skyrocketed, but an increase in supply has not followed, thereby leading to even higher oil prices.
The article quotes Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, who states, “According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects. They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”
Other than OPEC, there is no explicit agreement between oil producers to artificially restrict supply. According to the article, some of the presumed causes for the failure to increase supply stem from issues such as higher drilling costs, nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investments, high petroleum taxes, costly licensing agreements, scarce manpower, and political wrangling and violence.
The article states that according to Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, by 2012, gas prices in the United States could potentially reach $7 per gallon.
Bush EPA regulation pitting fish against power plants to be heard by High Court.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving utility company efforts to overturn an environmentally friendly holding by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The dispute in the case involves an EPA regulation that permitted energy companies to avoid the most costly technologies (closed-cycle cooling systems) that protect aquatic life in rivers and lakes surrounding power plants. The harm at issue stems from the process by which power plants take water from surrounding sources in order to cool the plant’s operations. Unfortunately, without this costly technological feature, this process does substantial damage to the aquatic life.
The Bush Administration put in place a rule that allowed these companies to undertake a case-by-case cost-benefit analysis in determining to what extent the damage to aquatic life should be mitigated by technology. Environmental groups sued, claiming that the Clean Water Act requires the use of the more expensive and effective technology, and the Circuit Court agreed—specifically holding that it was not clear that the costs of this technology could not be reasonably borne by the industry.
Although the Supreme Court will consider overruling this decision when the case comes before it, if the next president disagrees with this Bush Administration pro-business policy, the issue could quickly become moot, as the regulation could be overturned by the EPA.
In response to our readers…
We’ve received a number of compliments regarding the photographs that accompany many of our posts. Being an environmental blog gives us the opportunity to post some great photographs from some amazing artists. So, in response, we’ve put together a gallery of recent photographs used in our posts. Clicking on any of the pictures below will take you to the corresponding post. Enjoy… and please let us know if you like this feature.
Attention multi-unit property owners in Southern California.
According to the green home design site, re-nest.com, property managers and owners of buildings with more than two units are eligible for a program offered by Southern California Edison, where they will replace all of a building’s light bulbs with CFLs, and will even replace the light fixtures for free.
Re-nest indicates that the following are the requirements for participation:
1. The property must have 2 units or more
2. The owner must be an Edison customer
3. S/he must not have used this program in the last 3 years, and
4. Only owners or managers may apply.
Additional contact information and details are available at re-nest.
[Update: One of our readers sent us this link to a So-Cal Edison program for individual residential customers that allows residents to exchange up to 10 traditional light fixtures for more energy efficient units.]
Black cabs go green in NYC.
New York City Mayor Bloomberg continued to provide leadership in implementing policies intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions when he announced that all 10,000 of the city’s black town cars (also known by their politically incorrect nickname “Gypsy cabs,” due to the fact that they often cruise the city picking up passengers) would be required to increase their fuel efficiency standards to 30 miles per gallon by 2010. (They currently average around 13 miles per gallon.)
The result will be that these town cars are going to have to shift to hybrid technology in order to meet the strict requirements, which are intended to reduce their emissions by 50%. Mayor Bloomberg has a history of taking a strong leadership position on environmental issues, highlighted by his comprehensive plan to reduce the city’s aggregate carbon emissions by 30% by 2030, which also includes requiring all 13,000 of the city’s yellow cabs to be hybrids by 2012. READ MORE
-
Private Leaders
