Free Republic

You may never have never heard of Patricia Woertz, or Archer Daniels Midland. Woertz is the CEO of ADM, America’s 27th largest company, and it’s the largest company headed by a female in the US. The reason you ought to care is that Woertz and ADM have the power to make your life more expensive – much more expensive. And they have been aggressively exercising that power for over 30 years. ADM is the largest primary food processor in the country – it turns corn and soybeans (among other products) into a host of consumer products: corn flakes, cornstarch, corn...

Environment: Our growing addiction to alternative energy was killing aquatic life in the Gulf long before the Deepwater Horizon spill. Abandoning oil will kill more and also release more carbon dioxide into the air. President Obama sees the oil spill as a chance to make the planet a greener place by weaning us off fossil fuels and pushing us toward alternative energy. The earth and the Gulf of Mexico have indeed been getting greener lately, thanks to agricultural runoff due to a mandated surge in biofuels such as ethanol. Before the first gallon gushed from Deepwater Horizon, there existed an...

FREMONT (CBS 5 / AP) - President Barack Obama tours Solyndra, Inc. in Fremont Wednesday, a solar panel manufacturing facility, with Executive Vice President, Operations and Engineering Ben Bierman (R) and Chief Executive Officer Chris Gronet. President Barack Obama pointed to the Gulf oil spill disaster as another reason for Americans to move toward alternative energy resources during a visit to a solar energy plant in Fremont Wednesday. Speaking at the Solyndra plant, the President hailed the company advances in photovoltaic cell technology. Solyndra is building a new factory that will produce solar panels, using federal stimulus funds. ... At...

Opponents of land-based wind farms have a new ally in the form of MIT. Researchers there say that, far from mitigating global warming, land-based wind turbines actually increase the temperature around them.With the US Department of Energy expecting wind power to account for a fifth of the US’s electricity supply by 2030, the team used a climate model to analyze the effects of millions of wind turbines on the climate. Such a massive deployment could indeed make a difference, they found - though not necessarily a welcome one. Ron Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, and principal research scientist Chien...

Future Fuels: Our secretary of energy pushes bio-refineries and windmills to oil executives at an energy conference as the administration announces a three-year offshore drilling ban. This is a policy for economic suicide. They don't qualify as an official group of victims, but carbon-Americans, as they have been called, did not have much to cheer about last week, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed CERAWeek 2010, a premier industry conference hosted by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. With an economy struggling to regain sound footing, Chu advocated a starvation diet devoid of additional fossil fuels that are to remain under...

A fight brewing over the allocation of costs for transmission lines to connect wind and solar power plants to end users is the latest sign that fossil-fuel electricity producers are stepping up the fight against renewable energy sources. A coalition of 10 big utilities this week announced it would oppose provisions in Senate bill 1462 that gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to broadly allocate costs for long-distance transmission lines linking power sources to power users. The industry coalition maintains that only those who benefit from the new lines should be obliged to pay for them. Or, putting it...

Energy: When even Chuck Schumer is upset with the White House, you know something’s amiss. In this case, it’s news that efforts to boost wind power with taxpayer stimulus dollars are filling foreign coffers and creating foreign jobs. According to the …

Energy: When even Chuck Schumer is upset with the White House, you know something's amiss. In this case, it's news that efforts to boost wind power with taxpayer stimulus dollars are filling foreign coffers and creating foreign jobs. According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Investment Act has been spent on wind power. The goal was to further energy independence while creating American jobs. It has done neither. Of the money spent, according to the report, nearly 80% has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. "In all...

The battery, which has powered our lives for generations, may soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. British scientists say they have created a plastic that can store and release electricity, revolutionising the way we use phones, drive cars - and even wear clothes. It means the cases of mobiles and iPods could soon double up as their power source - leading to gadgets as thin as credit cards.

This is a video of a panel discussion at the Herzliya Conference in Israel which informed that the US can be oil energy independent in 10 years. Really fascinating.

Wind turbines placed in cities across Minnesota to generate power aren't working because of the cold temperatures. The Minnesota Municipal Power Association bought 11 turbines for $300,000 each from a company in Palm Springs, Calif.

Energy: The government says wind power could supply the eastern half of the U.S. with a fifth of its electricity by 2024. Just don't try building wind farms where someone might see them. A claim is contained in a new study released by the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and technically it might be true. But we've heard these overblown predictions before, and experience around the world with heavily subsidized alternative energy has not worked out well. The area in question, called the Eastern Interconnection, is a grid extending roughly from the western borders of the Plains states through...

January 13, 2010, 4:00 a.m. Earth-Shattering NewsAnother energy “alternative” hits the wall. By William Tucker Geothermal energy, the effort to tap the earth’s “renewable” internal heat, is often touted as the most promising potential source for clean, green energy — only this week, the White House was bragging about its investments in geothermal generation. Team Obama may not have noticed, but geotherm has had a rough few months. First off, Al Gore went on The Tonight Show in November, telling Conan O’Brien and his nighttime audience: People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all...

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...