Tag Archives: cap-and-trade
How I Pissed Off a Room Full of Environmentalists
In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences released a report indicating the United States probably only has enough coal to meet our needs for about 100 years. So why, when we know that coal’s reign cannot possibly last beyond this century, would we spend billions of dollars to make it “cleaner”? Continue reading
Common Values on Energy
Terms like “global warming” and “cap and trade” have become politicized and are distracting North Dakotans from the important issues in the energy and pollution debates. Let’s set partisanship aside, and watch common sense and shared values emerge. What are some shared values on which we can all agree? Continue reading
Report: Many Power Plants Emitting More Mercury
Many of America’s coal-fired power plants lack widely available pollution controls for the highly toxic metal mercury, and mercury emissions recently increased at more than half of the country’s 50 largest mercury-emitting power plants, according to a report Wednesday. Continue reading
Obama’s Challenges
In his State of the Union Speech, the president continues to endorse the creation of a clean energy economy built on carbon constraints and the expansion of a modern infrastructure that involves new generation and the intelligent utility. But he is also becoming increasingly vocal in his support for new nuclear power plants as well as the development of clean coal technologies and more offshore oil and gas drilling. Continue reading
Fortunes in Cap-and-Trade
Although the electric industry has endorsed the concept of cap-and-trade as the least onerous approach to carbon regulation, at least one major company endorses it with unalloyed enthusiasm. Exelon not only supports the idea, it stated in a second-quarter conference call to analysts, which it posted to its Web site, that it expects to see a “$1.1 billion and growing annual upside to Exelon revenues from implementation of Waxman-Markey.” Is that number real or simply wishful thinking? Does Exelon know something that’s escaped the rest of us? Continue reading
Outstanding critique of cap and trade by two EPA attorneys.
“The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more. The near-term opportunity to create an effective international framework would also be lost.” Continue reading
