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Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy said natural-gas production — with the right safeguards — is a major piece of Obama administration efforts to combat global warming. “Responsible development of natural gas is an important part of our work to curb climate change and support a robust clean energy market at home,” she said Wednesday at a speech in Colorado, according to prepared remarks. The comments are part of a wider administration effort to cast the U.S. gas production boom as a way to help slow global warming. They come two weeks after Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz rejected claims that...

Western-funded green groups are wrongly accusing mainland companies of causing environment destruction and creating social problems in Southeast Asia to restrain China's economic influence in countries along the Mekong River, a top government think tank claims in a new report published yesterday. Two studies, part of a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences annual report on co-operation and development in the Greater Mekong sub-region, admitted that agricultural, mining and hydro projects with Chinese investment had caused adverse environmental impact in countries including Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. But international environmental groups working in the region, most of which receive funding from Western...

Three months ago, the Obama administration made a little-noticed but potentially pivotal move in the stepped-up fight against climate change: it boosted the U.S. government's official estimate of the future economic damage caused by carbon pollution. The move should make it much easier for the EPA and other federal bureaus to enact tougher measures to crack down on emissions by showing that the greater benefits of such measures will justify their costs. "This has all the characteristics of a stealth approach toward making a greenhouse gas rule more justifiable by exaggerating the social benefits," said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for...

No longer profitable, thanks to renewables - but vital to keep the lights on The German government is engaged in increasingly heated negotiations with energy companies in an effort to stop them closing carbon-emitting power plants which have been rendered unprofitable by the national renewables policies.Last week power giant RWE grumbled that many of its coal and gas power stations "are no longer profitable to operate", and said it would be closing some of them down. Its rival E.ON also said that it had plants "working for nothing", and announced plant shutdowns. The problem for the fossil-fuel powerplants is the...

According to the carefully crafted plan of the Obama administration, there would be one million electric cars cruising around America's streets and highways by 2015. According to the plan, almost half of those vehicles would be Chevrolet Volts. So how well are President Obama's industrial policy plans working out in the real world? The easiest way to find out is to count up the number of Chevrolet Volt sales over time. Electric vehicle industry observer InsideEVs provides a monthly scorecard of the number of sales recorded for each primarily electricity-powered automobile in the U.S., from which we extracted the...

Marc Morano, a global warming skeptic and publisher of the website ClimateDepot.com, applauds the administration's strategy, if not its purpose. "The Obama administration is being strategically brilliant by doing this behind the scenes," he says. "They're going to achieve everything that cap and trade, and UN treaties and even a carbon tax would achieve through the invisibility of federal regulations. " A day after Lamberth's ruling, two lawmakers, Rep. Daryl Issa (R-Ca.) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) wrote Jackson, demanding all of her personal emails over the last four years that relate to her official duties. They are concerned the...

The U.S. Department of Energy will put up for auction this week a $50 million loan awarded to the now-closed Vehicle Production Group LLC, an unusual move by the DOE that may give U.S. taxpayers a chance to recoup a portion of their investment. The auction may also mark a path for the government to offload non-performing loans made to other troubled, taxpayer-backed companies, including hybrid sports car maker Fisker Automotive, which owes the DOE $192 million and has so far failed to secure a buyer. "I just don't see a great argument for making the bid and resurrecting either...

Full Title: Oh Mann… this can’t be good. Called a ‘charlatan’ and his gubernatorial pick linked to Solyndra in the same day!…But the situation is more delicate for those who gained their notoriety, made their reputations, and received their government funding on the old “sky is falling” model. For them acknowledging new facts means admitting the major possibility they were wrong. This includes conceding policy prescriptions based on their work may be draconian, counterproductive, and in the end vastly harmful to poorest of the world’s population. The ethanol disaster is but one example of “consensus” science taking food off the...

Dr. Benny Peiser at The Australian: Europe pulls the plug on its green future Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening to a green energy crisis, an economic and political debacle that is entirely self-inflicted.The mainstream media, which used to encourage the renewables push enthusiastically, is beginning to sober up too. With more and more cracks beginning to appear, many newspapers are returning to their proper role as the fourth estate, exposing the pitfalls of Europe’s green-energy gamble and opening their pages for thorough analysis and debate. Today, European media is full of news and commentary about the problems of an...

The real cost of moral-vanity, of name-calling, poor reasoning, selecting one’s evidence, and the triumph of doing things because they “feel-good” rather than because of the cold hard numbers, is measured in the trillions. This disaster was entirely foreseeable, totally predictable, and completely unnecessary.Thanks to Benny Peiser and The Australian, the utter folly is laid bare.AS country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realise that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities. Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening...

The Chevy Volt madness continued this week with General Motors announcing that consumers will see a $5,000 decrease in the price of President Obama's favorite green wonder-car. Sales of the Volt have been dismal, with most consumers refusing to be as smitten with the car as the President and the few enthusiastic green ideologues who seemed to believe that spending approximately $20,000 more for a car (over a gas-powered rival) that can save them about $3 a day in gas makes sense. What seems to go unrecognized is the fact that the price cut comes at the expense of GM...

Yeah, they're, like, really green and safe and good for you…..How much more dirt needs to come out before the wind industry gets the thorough investigation it has long deserved? The reason I ask is that it has now become clear that the industry has known for at least 25 years about the potentially damaging impact on human health of the impulsive infrasound (inaudible intermittent noise) produced by wind turbines. Yet instead of dealing with the problem it has, on the most generous interpretation, swept the issue under the carpet – or worse, been involved in a concerted cover-up operation....

A job for life. That's what they were promised. It wasn't in a contract, but to the 20 men who gathered for Bud Lights and commiseration Wednesday night in Greene County, working at a power plant was the equivalent. "This was the job everybody wanted," said Ray Christner Jr. of Brownsville. "We had it. And now it's gone."Nine days had passed since FirstEnergy announced it will shut down two power plants: Hatfield's Ferry, Greene County, across the Monongahela River from Masontown, Fayette County, and Mitchell in Union Township, Washington County, by Oct. 9 -- leaving 380 people without work."First, we...

On Wednesday, July 10, the House passed H.R. 2609—which Bloomberg News called a “$30.4 Billion Energy-Water Spending Measure.” The 2014 Energy-Water Development appropriations bill will cut spending on renewables and other green energy programs in half and was passed mostly along party lines—with 4 Republicans voting against and 7 Democrats for it.

Former Electric-car Engineer: Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas The New American 12 July 2013 Is the only "green" aspect of electric cars the money some companies make off them? If former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner (shown) is correct, this is exactly the case. Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas. And, he writes in a recent article entitled "Unclean at Any Speed," he was convinced cars such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence." But he now...

Despite little news over the past nine months since its last-minute abandonment of an initial public offering that was supposed to raise $76 million in cash, stimulus recipient Smith Electric Vehicles is showing little evidence it can inspire demand for its commercial trucks, like its plug-in car counterparts. Smith’s selling point for its step vans was that, unlike electric automobiles, delivery routes in urban areas did not require a long range between refueling (or, recharging). Frequent stops and short distances alleviated the “range anxiety” that accompanies cars like the Nissan Leaf. Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola and Staples were cited as early adopters...

SCOTLAND -- 80 birdwatchers got together in Scotland to get a glimpse of a White-throated Needletail: a rare bird that has not been seen in the United Kingdom for 22 years. The birders were there to watch the world's fastest flying bird, instead they witnessed it fly directly into a wind turbine where it was killed instantly. According to Bird Guides' Josh Jones: "It was seen by birders fly straight into the turbine."

There had been only eight recorded sightings of the white-throated needletail in the UK since 1846. So when one popped up again on British shores this week, twitchers were understandably excited. A group of 40 enthusiasts dashed to the Hebrides to catch a glimpse of the brown, black and blue bird, which breeds in Asia and winters in Australasia. But instead of being treated to a wildlife spectacle they were left with a horror show when it flew into a wind turbine and was killed.

As America's debt rises to unsustainable levels, the U.S. government is losing billions every year on energy tax subsidies that do little to combat climate change. That's according to a tough report released this week by the National Research Council. The non-partisan academic report concluded that current tax policies are a "poor tool" for addressing climate change -- and a costly one. It found energy subsidies in 2011 and 2012 cost $48 billion, with limited results. "Very little if any GHG (greenhouse gas) reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions," the report concluded. The report coincided with a...

As NLPC has covered Fisker Automotive’s catastrophic flop over the last few years since it was granted a $529-million taxpayer-guaranteed loan from the Department of Energy, one big question that repeatedly came up was: How could a company that produced only one electric car model burn through $1.4 billion in investment so quickly? Reuters uncovered a number of reasons in a report published earlier this week. Citing documents and some sources, mostly anonymous, the news syndicate painted a disturbing picture of mismanagement, incompetence, disinformation, and squander. While businesses stumble and go out of business every day, Fisker’s case illustrates why...