Among those hoping that global warming is real we should now count the EU.  As winter approaches there is, quelle surprise, the initial hint of yet another gas supply crisis between Russia, Ukraine and Russia’s EU customers.  The problem is that those pesky pipelines have to go through somewhere to reach the market and that somewhere happens to be the Ukraine (unless it’s Poland, more on that later).

Source: US DOE, for better map resolution

All those red lines running Northeast-to-Southwest carry gas from Russia to the EU countries.  There is just no getting around the Ukraine for most of the transits; it is big and (if you are Russian) in the wrong place.

Gas: The Great Green Hope for Europe

As noted previously, gas use in Europe is roughly the same as that of the US, a bit over 20 tcf annually. …

The slow moving Senate debate over climate change offers an opportunity to revisit the fundamentals of climate change. While the physical science about natural and anthropogenic forcings is the place to start, the economics of climate change is highly relevant for the policy debate. In this regard,  a perfectly timed literature review in the Spring 2009 The Journal of Economic Perspectives is worth studying.

There have been 13 – count them, 13 – studies published in the peer reviewed literature that have wrestled with the economic implications of a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GhGs) on a CO2-equivalent basis.  Those 13 studies have yielded 14 estimates of what will subsequently happen to global GDP.  For those who are curious, 10 of those studies assume a subsequent warming of 2.5 C; two assume that a 1 C warming would follow; and two assume a 3 C warming would follow. …

[After publication of my New York Times Op-ed on peak oil, Joseph Romm posted a response—and a challenge—on his website, and later expanded it on The Huffington Post. Below is Michael Lynch’s response.]

Thank you very much for your invitation to a wager on the price of oil, Joe, which I take to be serious, even though you made no effort to convey the wager to me personally. (If you were simply making a “‘pr” effort, feel free to withdraw it.) I would warn you that for most of my career I have been referred to as a ‘heretic’ or ‘contrarian’ and have repeatedly outperformed other forecasters by explaining (in a number of academic publications) why the forecasting of oil price and supply has been so deficient. That you appear to have been more prescient than me no doubt gives you confidence.…

Renewable energy generates a larger portion of the world’s electricity each year. But in relative terms, solar power generation is hardly a blip on the energy screen despite its long history of technological development. Solar-generated electricity has one major advantage over it’s more ubiquitous cousin wind power: electricity is generated during typical peak demand hours making this option attractive to utilities that value solar electricity for peak shaving. However, the capital cost of all the solar technologies are about $5,000/kW and higher and projects are moving forward only in particular regions within the U.S. with tough RPS requirements and subsidies from states and the federal government.

In Part I, we reviewed the enormous scale and capital cost considerations of photovoltaic projects and then introduced the standard taxonomy of central solar power generating plants.…