A few weeks ago, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies for coal-fired power plants.According to CRS, commercialization and widespread deployment of CCS will require “demand pull” regulation, such as Clean Air Act New Source Performance Standards, combined with cap-and-trade or carbon taxes; and it will require support for “technology push” RD&D (research, development, and demonstration) via government grants, tax preferences, and loan guarantees.

CCS will not be deployed on an industrial scale without “demand pull” regulation, because burning coal with CCS will always be more expensive than burning coal without it. Yet “technology push” RD&D to reduce CCS-related cost penalties is also critical. Although CRS does not explicitly say so, it implies that if CCS costs do not decline dramatically, carbon caps or taxes would make coal generation uneconomic.…

Many in the energy business, whether or not they support President Obama’s positions on energy and the environment, are likely to think, “Look, the US is a big ship. It cannot be turned around in a couple of years, and even if they tried, you can right the course at the ballot box.”

Actually, you can’t. The United States is still a nation of laws, and without strong political support, the acts of one administration cannot be easily reversed or undone by the next.

But there is more to the story than simple inertia and political head-counts. Each new administration enters with an agenda of positive goals. Spending time and political capital on your predecessor’s agenda can often find its way to the bottom of the to-do list. Moreover, a new president has only a limited circle of advisers.…

You might not think so, judging from climate doomsters’ oft-repeated claims that Kyoto-style policies will spur innovation, efficiency, and green-job creation, making us more competitive. Such claims imply that if anyone needs protection, it’s those benighted countries that refuse to embrace the hard-cap, soft-energy-path to a low-carbon future. …

Recently, there has been renewed concerns about efforts by China to acquire mineral assets overseas, taking advantage of recent company devaluations and their own abundant capital reserves. This is not a new concern, having arisen when Chinese companies began to look overseas for investment opportunities, particularly in the oil market, about a decade ago.

And this dates from nineteenth-century nations seeking to monopolize the whaling industry, to the English government establishing British Petroleum in an effort to avoid reliance on those undependable Americans. (Even the US, fearful of ‘running out’ of oil in the 1920s, established the Naval Petroleum Reserve, which proved useless.)

But there is some fire for all the smoke.…