Who’s Got the Greenest Electricity Supply of Them All?
Source: The Economist update: In response to Eli’s question regarding wind power in Denmark: Source: Renewable Energy Policy Network
Archive of posts filed under the energy category.
Media Sucks: Episode CVII
Rich Sweeney wonders why you hear so damn much about gasoline prices rather than the cost of food: [W]hy is that I can’t turn on the news without hearing, invariably in very tragic terms, about soaring gasoline prices, yet there is almost no coverage of soaring food prices? The short answer is that the media …
Solar Tax Credits
My colleague Michael Coleman had an excellent piece in this morning’s paper laying out the stakes and contending factions in the fight over solar tax credits: Senate Republicans and Democrats, almost all of whom say they support extending the solar tax credit, haven’t been able to agree on how to pay for it. Most Democrats, …
The Dramatic Effect of Europe’s Kyoto Commitment
More evidence that getting this whole climate mitigation thing right is going to be hard: Early analysis of data out today from the European Commission shows that emissions rose about 1.1% last year to 1.9 billion metric tons. That’s after similar increases in 2005 and 2006.
Weitzman pt. II
That’s all well and good, Marty, but stop squirming and tell us how much you’d price carbon at? That’s all we really care about: Weitzman hemmed and hawed and noted that the whole point of his paper was that there are these big uncertainties, and that previous attempts to calculate the socially optimal price on …
How Stuff Works
I’m a big fan of what I call “how stuff works” journalism: take a topic of the day and step back and explain how the darn thing works. Too often, we write either incrementally, or for insiders who already know the underlying structure of what we’re talking about. (This explains, for example, my ultimately fruitless …
Coal and Natural Gas
Keith Johnson (who is rapidly becoming my favorite explainer of how the energy-environment-economy system works) today discusses the role of the banking industry in pushing us away from coal and toward natural gas.
Biofuel Scam
As if the built in systemic problems associated with the current biofuel push were not enough, here’s a remarkable story from the Guardian in which biodiesel is shipped from Europe to the United States, then back, to qualify for the US biodiesel export subsidy: The “splash and dash” scam involves shipping biodiesel from Europe to …
Adaptation v. Mitigation, Episode XVI
David Roberts and Roger Pielke Jr. took another turn around the adaptation/mitigation block today. Roger argued, as he has for some time, that adaptation to the problems caused by climate change needs to be given the same due in policy discussions as attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigation,” in the parlance of the field.) …
Cost of Diesel
Silver Fox asked a great question in the comments a couple of weeks ago: I’m wondering why the price of diesel is higher than gasoline right now, when it was the other way around for so long? TWIP to the rescue! At winter’s end, we normally expect gasoline and diesel fuel prices to be converging, …