Free Republic

AMBOY, Calif. — Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region. But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy. Developers of...

Warming: After stifling a report questioning the science behind climate change, the EPA is censoring two of its lawyers for saying the proposed solutions are also problematical. The debate isn't over. It's being suppressed. In the proud tradition of EPA whistle-blower Alan Carlin, whose leaked study blew the lid off the EPA's hyped and flawed science behind climate change, two EPA lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have produced a Web video titled "A Huge Mistake." In it they say cap-and-trade in general and the Waxman-Markey bill in particular are the wrong answers anyway. Williams and Zabel do not deny...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Arizona State University two grants for alternative energy research that are part of a special DOE program to pursue high-risk, high-reward advances with the potential to change the way the nation generates and consumes energy. ASU’s grants, totaling more than $10 million, are among 37 new DOE grants totaling $151 million to support the program. ASU’s grants are for work on a new class of high-performance metal-air batteries and the use of photosynthetic bacteria to produce automotive fuel from a combination of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. “ASU is the only university...

Energy Policy: The heavily subsidized ethanol industry is the latest to seek a federal bailout. If there is any industry that deserves to go bankrupt, it's this one. Time has come to stop putting food in our gas tanks.The bailout-seeking domestic auto industry has been criticized as being unproductive and inefficient. It hasn't been helped by mandated fuel economy standards that have done little to reduce our dependence on foreign energy or help the environment. Now the fuel we have been mandated to put in our cars, equally unproductive and inefficient, is also seeking a bailout. Ethanol never made much...

There may be nothing so dangerous as a policy fantasy. A good one is like the H1N1 virus. It spreads on contact and threatens to infect everyone in its path. . . . Right now, one of the most dangerous policy fantasies is the distracting notion that government can create so-called green jobs and should strive to do so enthusiastically. While the principal proponent of the green jobs hokum, Van Jones, is now out of government, . . . President Barack Obama, of course, has been a veritable Typhoid Mary of the green job virus, . . . The analysis...

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs. But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water. Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water...

Climate: As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is? King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. In December, the world's...

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He's also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines. Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the...

What is happening with alternative "green" energy, involving such environmentally-unsound measures as erecting windmill generators along Appalachian ridgelines which are migration routes for songbirds, raptors, and Monarch butterflies, is a boondoggle, a fiasco, a travesty -- but it is all very politically correct, so none of that matters.

Climate Change: The EPA has prepared a finding for review that global warming is a public health threat, the first step toward regulating the American economy down to your lawn mower.We are often told how the pursuit of alternative energy will help save the earth from climate change and create lots of green jobs. Advocates rarely use the phrase "global warming" any more because the earth is in fact no longer warming, and hasn't for a decade due to a decline in solar activity and other natural factors. They prefer the phrase "climate change" because it can cover a multitude...

Energy Policy: California regulators are ready to conclude that corn ethanol cannot help the state fight global warming. It seems they've discovered putting food in our cars would destroy the earth in order to save it. California regulators have apparently discovered it ain't easy being green. The California Air Resources Board began two days of hearings in Sacramento on Thursday on a proposed Low Carbon Fuel Standard which considers the carbon intensity of fuels during a given fuel's entire life cycle. The California Environmental Protection Agency apparently has concluded that corn ethanol would not help the state implement Executive Order...

Energy Policy: Obama announces his energy team without mentioning a green source of renewable energy that could create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and reinvigorate a vital manufacturing sector — nuclear power.The domestic auto industry isn't the only uncompetitive industry that seems to require life-sustaining transfusions of government cash to stay in business. Alternative energy sources have relied on such subsidies, called "investments," for years. Yet in President-elect Obama's announcement of his energy team, we were told "the foundations of our energy independence" lie in "the power of wind and solar." Except that for these alternative sources there's been a severe...

Thirty years after Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, we return to the days of rising joblessness, an unresponsive economy, deference to dictators, gutting the military and an energy policy tilting at windmills... As history repeats itself on the anniversary of the speech MSNBC's Chris Matthews wrote, we wonder if the "Hardball" host, who has worked for four Democratic politicians, is still getting tingles up his legs. The Democratic Party apparently has learned nothing in the past three decades. Will we see a return of the misery index? The only thing that's different is the sweater.

MADISON, WI -- JULY 14, 2009 -- The stress of rising natural gas prices is leading many consumers to rethink how they heat their homes. For some this means moving towards modern alternative energy options, while others have been turning to a more traditional method for a solution to these rising costs. In Canada and the United States, wood burning stoves have been reevaluated as a potentially viable option for home heating. The case for modern woodstoves has developed with the improvement of the products on the market, as wood heating technology has substantially advanced in recent years. With the...

Climate Change: A switch of four Republican votes would have defeated Waxman-Markey, the Democrats' global warming legislation. But like the Clinton Btu tax, the bill could die in the Senate and turn the House over to the GOP.What were these RINOs thinking? The GOP is supposed to be the party of low taxes and free markets. Rep. Mike Castle, one of the eight offered an explanation right off of President Obama's teleprompter. "Nations around the world are surging ahead with emission reductions and developing new energy technologies," Castle, Delaware's at-large congressman, posted on his House Web site. "The United States...

The push for conversion to plug-in electric cars will do nothing to stop carbon emissions, a report by the GAO warns, throwing cold water on a push by Democrats to get more plug-ins on the road. In fact, the problem could be made worse as demand goes up at coal-fired electrical plants. Plus, the need for batteries may just have the US changing the dictators to which we’re chained, as IBD reports...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else. "If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

WASHINGTON – A GOP senator from the nation's leading coal-producing state contends Democrats will increase energy costs and make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil if they focus solely on alternative energy. In the party's weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Republicans support a more comprehensive energy plan that would increase funding for energy research, develop U.S. oil and gas resources and promote clean coal and nuclear power. ... .. Barrasso said wind and solar only account for about 1 percent of U.S. electricity, far below what is needed to meet the nation's energy...

“Voters want action on energy,� one congresswoman told The Washington Post. “They don’t really care how much it costs.� A Democratic president was on the verge of signing “the most important energy legislation in a decade,� with tens of billions of dollars dedicated to jump-starting a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels and helping the United States achieve “energy independence.� For too long, most analysts agreed, America had put off the hard choices necessary to prevent the next oil shock and wean the country from petrodictators in the Middle East. Now was the time for bold investment and leadership from Washington.The...

The president is wrong to block oil and gas production.It's only a matter of time before President Barack Obama's vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies. In the name of saving the planet from global warming, he has delayed new oil drilling, an action that will have major political repercussions once the world economy recovers. Instead of using some the stimulus billions to produce more gas and oil, Obama's wild-eyed supporters dream of "renewable" energy derived from corn, wind, sunshine, and even grass. With the appointment of extremists like climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren, Obama...

A fast spinning windmill appeared "out of control," and threatened traffic on the highway between Los Angeles County's high desert and the San Joaquin Valley, a CHP dispatcher in Bakersfield said today. The CHP dispatcher said the windmill is spinning too fast and might fly apart, which is why Highway 58 in the Tehachapi Pass was closed down both directions between Mojave and about 45 miles north of Lancaster and Tehachapi. The malfunctioning electric generator is one of thousands of windmills installed along both sides of Highway 58 in Tehachapi Pass. Traffic was being detoured onto parallel county roads. Traffic...

CBS's Knoller: Obama Burned 9,000 Gallons of Jet Fuel for One Earth Day Speech By Ken Shepherd Created 2009-04-23 12:21 President Barack Obama burned roughly 9,000 of jet fuel yesterday, Earth Day, and that only to deliver one speech in Iowa, reports CBS News's Mark Knoller in an April 22 Political Hotsheet blog post [1]. As if that weren't amusing enough, Knoller notes that the Air Force and the White House wouldn't disclose to Knoller how much fuel the president's plane burns on an average flight, so he had to consult with the manufacturer of the 747, Boeing: In flying...

Speaking in Iowa on “Earth Day” this afternoon, Pres. Obama lamented that only 3% of America’s electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar. He held Denmark out as a model, mentioning that the Scandinavian country produces almost 20% of its electricity via wind. He also bragged about the new jobs being created in Iowa and elsewhere in the wind power industry. Does PBO think we don’t read? Does he really expect to pull the windy wool over our eyes? Can he really expect the facts about the failure of the Danish wind power experiment not to be...

"We know the right thing to do," President Obama said about renewable energy at his press conference Tuesday. "We've known the right choice for a generation. The time has come to make that choice and act on what we know.…We have achieved more in two months for a clean energy economy than we have done in perhaps 30 years." Thirty years. Let's see, that would be 1979, right? Hmmm… wasn't that the year -- yes, that was when Jimmy Carter finally got his Grand Energy Plan through Congress, setting us the road to corn ethanol, the Synthetic Fuels Corporation and...

Republican Sen. John McCain rates President Barack Obama's first speech to Congress as "excellent." "There were areas that obviously I have questions about and disagreements with, but I think the theme of his speech and his delivery were excellent," the president's rival in last year's election said, following Tuesday night's speech. "I think he carefully balanced the enormity of the size of the challenges and difficulties that America faces and, at the same time, I think he gave Americans assurance and confidence that we can get through this," McCain said. The Arizona Republican said, however, that he has concerns. "I...

It’s almost axiomatic to say that we all care about the effects of global warming (hi Mr. Gore!). Nobody wants to swim down 5th avenue. But it really wasn’t until last year’s phenomenal oil spike that people started talking about alternative energy with any kind of practical fervor – and that brought investment dollars. Oh, how times have changed NYMEX Crude oil closed at $37.51 on Friday. Inventories at the Cushing, OK deliver point were pushed almost to the limits. Gasoline nation-wide averaged $1.94 (though I paid $2.09 a gallon locally) and while not great, it’s better than the nation-wide...

... The Hollywood Madam turned Pahrump laundromat owner says she's abandoning her plans to open a Nye County brothel catering to women. ... "I think I'm going to put all my property up for sale in Crystal," Fleiss said recently by phone from her house in Pahrump. "I don't want to work so hard ... and deal with all the nonsense in the sex business." Instead, she is focusing her attention on an alternative energy project she said is "perfect for Nevada." "That's where the money is," she said. "That's the wave of the future." Fleiss declined to elaborate on...

If you can't beat 'em, rob 'em. President Obama spent his first week in office lurching to left on all things green but it appears that's a thirst that isn't easily quenched for many. WaPo's editorial page today laments that it's not quite enough. PRESIDENT OBAMA this week made an initial break from the frustrating inaction of President Bush on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. This reflected a welcome change in attitude at the White House. Unfortunately, the regulatory action that Mr. Obama set in motion is not the best, or even the second-best, approach to curbing climate change. You know,...

PROVO — Within six months of discovering a massive geothermal field, a small Utah company had erected and fired up a power plant — just one example of the speed with which companies are capitalizing on state mandates for alternative energy.

Daredevil SAS man-turned-explorer Bear Grylls was being airlifted to South Africa last night after being badly injured filming a TV documentary in Antarctica. The 34-year-old adventurer broke his shoulder in a life-threatening fall and was said to be in ‘shock and agony’ from a serious fracture which left the bone protruding from his body. The accident happened at 11pm British time on Friday, and Bear’s insurance company arranged for his evacuation by air ambulance for urgent medical treatment, at an estimated cost of £60,000. Daredevil: Bear Grylls broke his shoulder Bear was injured during the making of his latest daredevil...

Lots of things have gone wrong for lots of industries in recent months. But the misfortunes of clean energy firms rank among the most gut-wrenching. Long seen as the bright hope for a future of lesser dependence on fossil fuels, companies that deal in solar, wind and biofuel have been hit by a double whammy. The prices of fossil fuels have tumbled at the very moment that investment capital and credit for these young developing firms has dried up. This one-two punch has bloodied noses along the entire chain of clean energy development, from venture-funded startups to multi-billion dollar publicly...

This is not what President-elect Barack Obama's energy and climate strategists would want to hear. It would be anathema to Al Gore and other assorted luminaries touting renewable energy sources which in one giant swoop will save the world from the “tyranny” of fossil fuels and mitigate global warming. And as if these were not big enough issues, oilman T. Boone Pickens’ grandiose plan for wind farms from Texas to Canada is supposed to bring about a replacement for the natural gas now used for power generation. That move will then lead to energy independence from foreign oil. Too good...

The trouble with incentives In science there is a theory called the butterfly effect. It could have a big impact on pension funds that have made renewable energy and other green investment a major part of their alternative strategy, and that are hopeful the administration of President-elect Barack Obama and a new Congress will promote policies and incentives to encourage growth of this new economic sector. The butterfly effect suggests that a small change in conditions (e.g., a butterfly flapping its wings in California) can reverberate to cause unpredictable major changes throughout a system (e.g., a major storm on the...

The alternative-energy industry thinks it can make wind and solar power a lot more useful -- by building a better battery. One of the big problems with wind and solar is that they're often not generated when they're needed. Winds are usually strongest at night, for instance, when demand for power is at its lowest. That makes it tough for utilities to effectively integrate alternative power sources into their energy mix. Now companies across the globe are working on a potential solution: batteries that can store wind and solar power and release it onto the grid at times of heavy...

When Diana Higley received her September utility statement from Sheffield Utilities, she thought it was a mistake. It showed a $6.30 credit. But there was no mistake, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Sheffield affiliate assured her. Advertisement "I was shocked, amazed and thrilled," said Higley, who adopted her three grandchildren, ages 9, 8 and 4, to raise as a single mom. "I couldn't believe it. I never dreamed they would owe me money." Higley's dream came courtesy of Habitat for Humanity. In August she moved into a newly built 1,200-square-foot Habitat house in Tuscumbia. It is the first zero-energy, solar-powered Habitat...

"When oil prices dropped, it killed that push to ethanol – and you could have that happen again," says Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. But there is a safety net this time, he and others agree: the US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Today the US produces 9 billion gallons of ethanol from corn but under RFS is mandated to make 36 billion gallons by 2022. That demand, most of which must by law come from cellulosic ethanol and advanced biofuels, is aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving US energy security. The RFS currently pays...

The People's Republic of California - which voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 24 points - did something else that should send an even louder message: the "green," "global warming," "alternative energy" initiatives got utterly annihilated. Proposition 7 - which would have required utilities to generate 40 percent of their power from renewable energy by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025 - went down 65% to 35%. And Proposition 10 - which would have created $5 billion in general obligation bonds to help consumers and others purchase certain high fuel economy or alternative fuel vehicles,...

Israel today is at the height of a revolution whose main focus is the integration of natural gas into the electricity and industrial sectors. The desalination plant in Ashkelon, which is one of the largest in the world, is using natural gas, as is the paper mill in Hadera. Israel is in contact with the government of Turkey regarding the construction of an infrastructure corridor called the Med Stream, which is planned to contain three pipelines. One is for crude oil, meaning that what arrives through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline or the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline will continue on to Israel. The second...

HOUSTON — For all the support that the presidential candidates are expressing for renewable energy, alternative energies like wind and solar are facing big new challenges because of the credit freeze and the plunge in oil and natural gas prices. Shares of alternative energy companies have fallen even more sharply than the rest of the stock market in recent months. The struggles of financial institutions are raising fears that investment capital for big renewable energy projects is likely to get tighter. Advocates are concerned that if the prices for oil and gas keep falling, the incentive for utilities and consumers...

The California Independent System Operator said Thursday it is eyeing an expected influx of thousands of plug-in electric cars in the state by the year 2012 that could pose a challenge to its grid's power flows unless the cars are developed to charge only at night. The ISO met with researchers from the University of California-Davis on Wednesday, who are studying plug-in cars, to get a handle on what sort of impact plug-in cars will have on the grid in coming years. "We really don't know yet," what the impact will be, and the university researchers were not able to...

Barack Obama promised today, in Martinsville, VA, to bring "millions" of union jobs through alternative energy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, 1.5 million people in the United States were employed in the petroleum industry...

SOCORRO, New Mexico (STPNS) -- Obama’s latest ad about creating 5 million new jobs really got my attention. Up to this point my opinion was that he really doesn’t say anything meaningful, but 5 million jobs would be a great thing. So I took the bait and went to his site to see if he had something concrete to say for a change (you owe me big time for wading through all his rhetoric). And (drum roll) – nada, zero, zip, bumpkus. He says he will create the jobs, but as far as I can tell, he will do it...

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats. To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this...

What's in store for America when most of its electricity is generated by the sun and wind? Trouble, turmoil and tyranny. With more than 125 wind farms, England is many years ahead of us when it comes to alternative power. But it has just as many NIMBYs per capita as America, and theirs detest wind farms. A 2007 government-commissioned study found upward of three-quarters of people living within 1.2 miles of "condor Cuisanarts" say the loud whooshing sound the blades make is ruining their health and quality of life. But their biggest complaint was about falling property values. More than...

People are mighty miffed at the price of gasoline and my favorite presidential candidate, Sen. Obama, does not seem to be offering much. Yes, he talks about a grand “go to the moon” scheme of “alternative energy” development a la Kennedy and like Mitt Romney. But he’s tied to orthodox Democratic objections to more drilling and to nuclear power, both of which people sense are needed. More important, Obama has not brought his own more progressive thoughts into a clear focus that people can understand as meaningful. It’s not just about “alternative energy”. It’s about how you cut the cost...

They Call the Wind Energy by: Jeff Waldmann, July 29, 2008 The solutions to the energy crisis and relief for unemployment woes can all be found across the pond in Europe, according to a July 22 panel at the Center for American Progress. The panel, including two U.S. experts on both alternative energy and green building and two European officials, discussed energy policy in great detail, and were particularly interested in the application of alternative energy policy in Europe here in the United States. While the event promised to be a discussion of solutions to global warming, and the policies...

America is currently facing energy challenges reminiscent of the 1970s. Unfortunately, rising gas prices have policymakers repeating the mistakes from that decade—mistakes that took a bad situation and made it worse.[1]Then, as now, good energy policy is easy to distinguish from bad energy policy: Good policy leads to more supplies of affordable energy; bad policy leads to less. Chief among the good policies is expansion of domestic oil production, and chief among the bad are windfall profits taxes, price controls, and federal subsidies and mandates for alternative energy sources. These bad ideas were tried before and backfired, and they will...

- Jerry Taylor is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Virtually every claim made by T. Boone Pickens to justify the lavish subsidies he is seeking for his wind energy investments is flat wrong. First, oil imports are not the cause of high gasoline prices. On the contrary, oil imports serve to keep gasoline prices down. After all, we import oil for a reason -- it's cheaper than the domestic alternative. If we were to restrict our energy diet to energy produced in the United States, it would make domestic energy producers (like Mr. Pickens) far richer and energy...

A Baytown businessman could hold the solution to the nation's energy crisis. The joke around the office at Sustainable Power Corp. these days is what Chairman John Rivera likes to call the, "Liars Club." Why? "Anyone you tell about this will call you a liar," he said. In an economy that has been held hostage by oil prices rapidly approaching the stratosphere, this Baytown-based alternate energy company has found a way to make substantial amounts of crude oil from farm waste. Now Rivera must convince potential investors that his trade secret - 21 years and $31 million dollars in the...