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Recession Cuts Europe’s Carbon Emissions

By Jad Mouawad

As negotiators from the world’s biggest economies negotiate a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, they might find little comfort in this fact: There’s nothing like a crippling recession to reduce carbon emissions.

Last year, as the economy slowed down, emissions of these global-warming gases dropped by 6 percent in Europe, according to a report by Point Carbon, a market analysis firm. European countries, which have established a market mechanism to curb carbon emissions, had been struggling to meet their targets before the economic downturn.

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Saudi Minister Urges Caution on Renewable Energy

Fears about energy security, and last year’s oil price spike, have sparked a serious push for renewable energy in the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer.

The trend is apparently making the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, nervous.

Speaking at a major energy conference earlier this month, Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, offered an impassioned defense of oil, which he called “an enabler of progress and prosperity.” He cautioned that the current economic crisis — and the uncertainties over future oil consumption — could force producers to trim their supplies, and hence could cause a new price shock.

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Ontario Introduces Green Stimulus Funds

With the province reeling from steep manufacturing employment declines, the Ontario government introduced a $24 billion stimulus budget on Thursday that includes $593 million in green-economy spending, as well as $2.6 billion for transit projects, mostly in the Greater Toronto region.

While Ontario’s 1.1 percent year-over-year job decline through January 2009 is well below the rate in the United States of 2.9 percent, the province’s export-oriented manufacturing sector has contracted by 11.1 percent, comparable to losses felt in states such as Indiana and Ohio.

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Cape Wind Navigates Shifts in Market

The controversial and long-delayed Cape Wind project — which could become the first offshore wind farm in the United States — is inching forward.

The next milestone is a decision by the Interior Department about whether to issue a lease for the project (something that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar discussed during an interview with The New York Times last week).

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Study Forecasts 297,000 Green Jobs

Establishing standards for the amount of the nation’s energy to come from renewables will create lots more jobs like these, a new study says.

The debate over the potential for green jobs creation in this country continues.

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Economy Trumps Environment in Poll

My friend and colleague, Charles Blow, pointed me to this recent Gallup poll last night. Said the pollsters last Thursday:

For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.

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European Barriers to American Biodiesel

Amid persistent talk of global protectionism these days, with Mexico, Russia and India tightening up on imports for one reason or another, the energy sector appeared fairly immune from the barriers — until now.

A front page article in The Houston Chronicle Monday warned that the American biodiesel industry will suffer from European barriers (which my colleague, Kate Galbraith, took note of last week), and several Texas companies and the Port of Houston are preparing for heavy losses.

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Energy Department Issues First Renewable-Energy Loan Guarantee

The Energy Department has tentatively awarded its first alternative-energy loan guarantee, breaking a four-year logjam in the federal loan program.

The $535 million loan guarantee will go to Solyndra Inc., which said it would use the money to expand its production of photovoltaic systems at its facilities in Fremont, Calif. The company said the federal loan guarantee would cover roughly 75 percent of the project costs and would ultimately produce thousands of new construction, manufacturing and installation jobs.

Once the panels are installed and producing power, the company said, they will generate up to 15 gigawatts of electricity and save some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

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American Biodiesel Makers Reeling

The American biodiesel industry is hurting, and it shows.

Last week Imperium Renewables, one of the country’s biggest biodiesel refiners, cut 24 employees — which according to the Seattle Times amounts to a majority of the staff at its plant in Washington state.

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Big Oil Buys Struggling Ethanol Maker

Lately it’s been nothing but bad news for the ethanol industry. Ethanol prices have been dropping, gasoline consumption is down, political support is flagging, and dozens of plants around the country are idle or producing well below capacity.

But suddenly there is some good news from an unexpected quarter. Valero Energy, the country’s biggest independent refiner, is going to buy seven ethanol plants from bankrupt VeraSun Energy for $477 million.

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An Unusual Plan to Offset Carbon Taxes

A carbon tax does not exist yet in this country (well, except in Boulder, Colo.). But governments and businesses are preparing for the possibility of such a tax — sometimes in unusual ways.

Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported that Tennessee had managed to attract two solar manufacturers in part by agreeing to pay their portion of any future carbon tax.

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Weapons Plutonium - A Tough Sell as Reactor Fuel

The Mixed Oxide Fabrication Facility as it appeared, under construction, in September. The plant is nearly a decade behind schedule.

When Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed in 1998 to cut the risk of war by destroying surplus plutonium from nuclear bombs, the American approach, for many people, had a pleasing ring to it: convert the material to fuel for civilian power reactors.

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Could Small Nations Like the Maldives Lead in Renewable Energy?

Under the Kyoto climate treaty, the big industrialized nations that put the vast majority of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere were supposed to spearhead the transition to a low-carbon economy, partly by rolling out vastly more renewable sources of energy.

Over the weekend, it became clear that, instead, some of the countries that many scientists say are most vulnerable to climate change could be the ones to lead by example.

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a chain of low-lying islets in the Indian Ocean, is aiming to make his country the first carbon-neutral nation by fully switching to the use of renewable energy within a decade, according to The Observer, a newspaper published on Sundays in Britain.

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Home Green Home: Hunting Energy Leaks

On the occasion of my first home energy audit, I decided to see what I could dig up on the topic from The New York Times’s archives. How far back, I wondered, does this notion go — particularly the idea of using infrared cameras and other high-tech gizmos to really get the energy fingerprint of a home?

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Biodiesel That Conquers the Cold?

Dr. Andy Soria, a scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, fills up a pickup truck with 100 percent Permaflo Biodiesel, made from soybean oil in Indiana. He and several other researchers tested the fuel on a road trip to the Arctic Circle.

Bernard Tao, a researcher at Purdue University in Indiana, says he’s found a way to overcome one of biodiesel’s biggest hurdles: its tendency to thicken and gel up in cold weather.

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Despite Gloom, Promising Clean-Tech Trends

In 2009, long-distance transmission lines will be in high demand to connect renewable resources in rural areas to population centers, according to a new report.

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Could Renewables Supply 40 Percent of Global Power by 2050?

Scientists at a climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, told reporters on Wednesday that some authorities may be downplaying the potential for sources like wind and solar to deliver future power needs.

Peter Lund, a professor of energy systems at the Helsinki University of Technology, said his forecasts for the potential of renewable sources were about double those of the International Energy Agency.

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Boeing and Vestas Form Research Partnership

A wind-turbine blade 44 meters long (144 ft.) and weighing 7 tons forms part of the the Vestas display this week at an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It is only a partnership. But it is an interesting sign of how industries may combine forces under a carbon-constrained economy.

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A New Valve for Controlling Flows of Electricity

A variable frequency transformer is already in use in Quebec, but a new installation scheduled for New Jersey will be used to control power flows in new ways.

Transformers are usually simple tools, used to step up or step down the voltage of electricity, but an unusual new device is expected to make its debut on the electric grid later this year: a Variable Frequency Transformer.

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How to Distribute $646 Billion in Carbon Market Revenues?

Should revenues from any potential carbon market in the United States be used to help preserve endangered ecosystems elsewhere?

Under a cap-and-trade system, polluters buy permits, usually from government authorities, to compensate for their emissions. Such a system would raise hundreds of billions of dollars in an economy the size of the United States.

So, what should governments do with that money?

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