It was sadly ironic that Texas energy company Luminant announced it would lay off 500 employees on the same morning that President Obama unveiled legislation designed to promote job growth. The company said that a new rule from the Environmental Protection Agency will force it to cease operations at two electricity generating plants, and close three coal mines. “We have hundreds of employees who have spent their entire professional careers at Luminant and its predecessor companies,” Luminant CEO David Campbell said in a news release. “At every step of this …
Speaking before a new Congress in his State of the Union address, President Obama gave an alternative suggestion for Congress now that cap and trade is out of the picture. He pitched an aggressive clean energy standard, saying he wants 80 percent of our electricity to come from carbon-free sources of energy by 2035. For reference, the Energy Information Administration shows that carbon-free sources generated 31 percent of our total electricity in 2009 (20 percent nuclear, 7 percent hydroelectric, and 4 percent other renewables). As Kim Strassel points out in …
With Congress divided, will anything actually get done in the next two years? President Obama recently suggested energy policy as an area in which bipartisan support could exist. Rather than trying to pass a large climate change bill, Obama stressed the importance of increasing technologies and energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – including nuclear, clean coal, electric vehicles, wind, solar, and renewable fuels. Sometimes deemed an “all of the above” energy approach, it guarantees handouts and subsidies for all energy sources to make everyone happy. In other words, …
For a country that is still heavily dependent on coal power, news of a more efficient (read: lower-carbon-emitting) coal plant should be greeted with roaring applause from the environmental community. Unfortunately, under the Obama Administration, the U.S. Export-Import bank can’t see past the black and white idea that coal and other fossil fuels are the enemies of the environment, and only renewables can save it. This mentality creates double standards, as when White House denied a $250 million Ex-Imp Bank loan to a coal power plant in India equipped with …
The front page of the New York Times today has an article on China building cleaner coal-fired plants. The title and the article are fairly accurate but any conclusions should be carefully drawn. In particular, China is not taking effective steps to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. In raw terms, China does genuinely invest a great deal of money in “green energy.” That’s because, in raw terms, the PRC invests a great deal of money in everything, including industries which heavily pollute.
Reducing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been the talk of town for awhile now, but uncertainties remain on how to best do it without completely devastating an already crippling economy. One of the biggest challenges is how to burn coal, which provides 50% of America’s electricity, without emitting CO2.. At present time, the most viable option is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). The goal of CCS is to capture carbon emitted from coal burning generation facilities, compress it, transport it, and store it in sealed geologic formations, but when …
