Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
The silent revolution in energy efficiency
– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own —
Current debates about cutting energy consumption and carbon emissions often carry a strong undercurrent of asceticism.
There is an almost missionary zeal to save the planet by reverting to a simpler and more satisfying past when energy consumption was lower (or at least encourage other people to make necessary sacrifices).
Will biofuel from algae look like Big Oil or Big Agriculture?
Hundreds of companies and laboratories are racing to find an economical way to make “green crude” from algae. The biofuel industry is grappling with a series of hurdles, which players readily recognized at a summit this week in San Diego and we cover in this story.
One question asked by one of the sector’s early leaders is will biofuel from algae look like Big Oil or Big Agriculture.
Steve Mayfield, who directs a new center for algae biotechnology at the University of California, San Diego, believes it should be more like agriculture.
“We’re not going to grow it in the lab … We are going to grow it on rice patties,” Mayfield said at the Algae Biomass Summit in San Diego.
i think it is dumb gross and crazy for them to do that
Calling Dr. Strangelove!
Perhaps you’ve heard about the Russian submarines patrolling international waters off the U.S. East Coast (if you haven’t, take a look at a Reuters story about it) in what feels like an echo of the old Cold War. The Pentagon’s not worried about this particular venture, but there are concerns from the U.S. energy industry about another Russian foray — this one in concert with Cuba. In rhetoric that may ring a bell with anyone who saw the 1964 satirical nuclear-fear movie “Dr. Strangelove,” the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research is sounding the alarm about a Russian-Cuban deal to drill for offshore oil near Florida.
“Russia, Communist Cuba Advance Offshore Energy Production Miles Off Florida’s Coast,” is the title on the institute’s news release. Below that is the prescription for action: “Efforts Should Send Strong Message to Interior Dept. to Open OCS in Five-Year Plan.” OCS stands for outer continental shelf, an area that was closed to oil drilling until the Bush administration opened it last year in a largely symbolic move aimed at driving down the sky-high gasoline prices of the Summer of 2008.
Environmentalists hate the idea. So does Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has made opposition to offshore drilling one of his signature issues. But as it turns out, it’s unlikely that anybody — from Russia, Cuba, the United States or anywhere else — is going to get petroleum out of the OCS in the immediate future.
For a start, it takes time to set up a deep-water offshore drilling rig. And any Cuban effort would be further hampered by the need to use equipment with less than 10 percent American technology, to comply with the long standing U.S. embargo against Cuba. As my Reuters colleague Russell Blinch reported in June, there may be scope for possible U.S.-Cuban cooperation here but no Cuban drilling platform is likely to be in the area this year.
…we need to apply all forms of energy that does not require electricity to create it in the first place, ranked from cheap to expensive. The environmental scale has tipped, to what the f ? maybe we can set jellyfish on fire with flints and see what happens.
A tax by any other name…
Can semantics help save the planet?
A showdown between leaders of Chevron Corp and the Sierra Club on Wednesday night revealed a number of shared beliefs between the two California institutions, particularly about the need for a transparent way of pricing carbon.
The debate at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Wednesday night pitted Chevron CEO David O’Reilly against Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and both agreed that limiting carbon emissions should involve some sort of levy imposed by the government – if only there was a word for such a thing.
“It would be much cleaner if there was a transparent cost on carbon that one could see,” O’Reilly said.
Peru clashes raise green issues
Clashes in the Amazon between indigenous protestors and Peru’s army that killed some 60 people last week throw some old issues into sharp new relief: development versus the environment and local versus foreign control of natural resources.
Indigenous tribes, worried they will lose control over natural resources, have protested since April seeking to force Peru’s Congress to repeal new laws that encourage foreign mining and energy companies to invest billions of dollars in huge tracts of pristine rain forest.
In the developing world, extractive industries have a bad record of bringing benefits to local people. Prime examples include the oil-rich Niger Delta in Nigeria and mineral-rich South Africa under apartheid.
Those governments only see the forests as something standing in their way to the real big money. The real prize is the sale of mining concessions of the valuable resources that lie underneath.
from Summit Notebook:
Kinder: wind, solar not the answer to U.S. energy needs
Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, says the Obama Administration's push to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are not the answer to reducing the nation's dependence on oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click below to hear where Kinder thinks the U.S. should be focusing its attention.
Kinder: wind, solar not the answer from Reuters TV on Vimeo.
Chevron CEO sees smoke and mirrors in cap and trade
“If you liked credit derivatives swaps, you’re going to love cap-and-trade.”
One can presume that Chevron Chief Executive David O’Reilly is not a fan of the current deep worldwide recession — which was worsened by a credit-market lockup blamed in part on hard-to-value securities.
And, he made it very clear on Thursday that he is not enamored of the system the Obama administration hopes to use to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, which are produced through the burning of fossil fuels sold by the No. 2 U.S. oil and gas company.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” O’Reilly told a Boston business group. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a difficult system. I don’t think the American people trust it.”
politicians – especially this new group – love nothing more than talking about taxes, except raising them. how any of this nonsense addresses vanity-stoking gas-guzzlers and a need for thoroughly overhauling mass transit escapes me. individuals also need to rein-in fuel consumption, and tax incentives for doing so would be a welcomed change to the stick-heavy policies of washington and the states
Seeking sentiment on drilling, Salazar gets an earful
There is no doubt that Californians made themselves clear on Thursday when they gathered to tell U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar that they had had enough of offshore oil drilling and were ready to turn their attention to solar, wind and other renewables.
“I think the verdict today is very clear, that drilling is inappropriate,” said Leah Zimmerman, who attended the meeting dressed in a polar bear suit.
“California is well-known for being an innovative state. Why not take advantage of that rather than trying to dampen it?” asked Craig Cadwallader of the Surfrider Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting oceans and beaches.
When Salazar took office in January he was handed a Bush-era plan to open parts of the Atlantic, Gulf Coast, Pacific, and Alaska to outer continental shelf drilling.
Great to hear the people of California have got their priorities right.
Group wants oil, gas drillers to follow rules in U.S. West
An environmental group this week issued a report saying oil and gas companies have enjoyed exemptions to common sense anti-pollution federal rules that govern companies in other industries. This has led, the Environmental Working Group claims, to fouled groundwater, creeks and acres and acres of formerly pristine land in the U.S. West.
The report, “Free Pass for Oil and Gas in the American West,” contains county-by-county maps of what it says are examples of mismanagement of the oil and gas industry.
“Drilling companies regularly complain that environmental standards deny them access to sites where they’d like to drill,” the EWG said. “But the cratered landscape tells a different story.”
The report claims that 270,000 oil and natural gas wells have been drilled since 1980, and 120,000 of them since 2000. Most of those wells are for natural gas.
I live in western Colorado in a county where drilling is on the rise and a waste pit is being proposed. It feels a little hopeless to protest as the commissioners are generally in support of the drilling. Are those who are concerned really have a voice here?
T. Boone Pickens: What, me worry?
Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is spending $2 billion on a bunch of windmills and so far has no way to get the electricity they will produce to market. Last December he said he was a touch anxious, but on Wednesday he didn’t seem worried at all.
Pickens is pretty sure President Barack Obama will get some new power lines built to those plains in the Texas panhandle, but if need be, the oil-man-turned-renewable-energy-advocate will take his toys elsewhere.
“I’m not going to end up with 687 turbines in my garage. They are going to be sticking up spinning someplace,” he said at a San Francisco stop on his latest tour to drum up support for his plan to use wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicles to wean the Unites States from imported oil.
Pickens expects the price of a barrel of oil to hit $75 by the end of the year as OPEC cuts production, and between that and the desire for energy independence he sees Obama finding a way to get transmission lines built from Texas to markets that need electricity – like California.
I own 15 acres in Washinton state while I have no natural gas and the land would not support a wind project Eastern Washington is way above average for sunny days but I find it very difficult to navigate my way through the sea of red tape I have the equiptment and the will to build a small scale solar farm but when I constantly hit a wall I fear I haven’t the stomach for all the B.S. that comes with it. My project would only produce 1MW of electricty but I feel many small scale projects like mine is a large piece to the overall puzzle
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The key point here is that we can and must change our current way of life, but that we can do so without changing the quality of life. We need to do so ASAP before the developing world makes the mistakes we did with our cities (automobile dependence, urban sprawl, environmental damage). Fortunately, there is an opportunity here to improve quality of life, while reducing environmental footprint if we focus on the right technologies and incentives, and are strong with vested interests that would hold the economy ransom rather than see such change.