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Obama Touts Clean Energy Achievements

President Obama delivered a speech against a backdrop of solar panels at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base on Wednesday.

Speaking at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, home to the nation’s largest solar electric installation, President Obama hailed the accomplishments of the economic stimulus package on Wednesday, placing special emphasis on clean energy.

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Climate Bill Could Override Regional Efforts

By Kate Galbraith

Tucked deep into Tuesday’s hefty climate bill draft is an innocuous-sounding sentence:

‘‘Notwithstanding section 116, no State or political subdivision thereof shall implement or enforce a cap that covers any capped emissions emitted during the years 2012 through 2017.”

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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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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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Salazar Talks Guns, Parks and Solar Power

In an interview last Friday with The New York Times, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised “aggressive” pursuit of renewable energy projects on public lands, but provided no firm date for his department’s highly anticipated decision on the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts .

“From my point of view, I am not going to let political issues stand in the way of us moving forward with an energy program in the offshore,” he said.

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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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E.P.A. Proposal Calls Greenhouse Gases a Danger to the Public

The Environmental Protection Agency has sent a proposal to the White House that would label carbon dioxide a danger to public welfare — a key precursor to regulating greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants.

The long-awaited finding, sent to the Office of Management and Budget, stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the agency was found to have the authority to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming.

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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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Michael Steele: ‘We Are Not Warming’

Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said we live on a cooling planet.

The Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, has weighed in on climate change.

In a March 6 radio appearance that is only now percolating through the blogosphere, Mr. Steele apparently fielded a skeptic’s question about global warming. As transcribed by The Huffington Post, a liberal site, Mr. Steele thanked the questioner and replied this way:

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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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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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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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The Quarrel Over Coal Ash Waste

The area around the Kingston Fossil Plant in Harriman, Tenn., where 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled last December. The Natural Resources Defense Council warns that more of this is likely.

The Natural Resources Defense Council on Thursday released a list of what it called the top 15 “filthy” states where plans to build new coal-fired power plants will lead to the production of 14 million additional tons of coal ash waste each year.

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Boulder Considers Carbon Tax Increase

The city of Boulder, Colo., is considering an increase in its carbon tax — though that likely won’t be enough to meet greenhouse goals.

The first city in the United States to introduce a carbon tax may have to raise it in order to meet emissions-reduction targets.

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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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Integrating Wind and Hydro Power in Quebec

Can wind and water be combined to reliably produce clean power?

When Hydro-Quebec begins construction next summer on the 1550 MW La Romaine hydroelectric dam, the $2.8 billion-a-year utility will be simultaneously developing smart grid control and load forecasting technologies aimed at integrating hydropower with Quebec’s fast growing inventory of wind farms.

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Companies Earn Big Profits From Free Carbon Credits

Discussion of carbon cap-and-trade systems usually focuses on whether such schemes can set a workable price for permits, given the volatility that has characterized the system in Europe.

Companies are concerned that issuing too few permits will make them costly and force industry to spend a lot of money to clean up their operations. Environmentalists are concerned that issuing too many permits would make them cheap and allow companies and industry to get away with doing too little remediation.

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