It’s easy to bash coal. There’s no romance in the black rocks that provide about half of the electricity in the United States and about 28.6 percent of the world’s total primary energy. And that bashing has become easier still in recent weeks. A few days before Christmas, at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge holding pond failed, spilling coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals including arsenic, lead, barium, chromium and manganese over several hundred acres.[1] On December 29, James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore on the issue of global warming, sent an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in which he called coal-fired power plants “factories of death.”…
Continue ReadingAfter agreement was reached in December 1997 on the Kyoto Protocol, its supporters pronounced that major carbon reductions were feasible and probable. Just do it, as the Nike commercial said. Build it and they will come, as the Field of Dreams movie said. And during the eight years of George W. Bush, Kyoto supporters complained mightily that we were leaving dollars on the ground, so to speak, while running out of climate and time.
Now under Obama…
Continue ReadingOne hopes, as Obama constructs his energy and climate policy, that someone points him to an interesting article by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal. In the article, Moore points out something that I experienced first-hand in California and that, in fact, guided me into a career in economic and environmental policy. What I noticed,…
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