San Francisco’s environmentally friendly low-flush toilets are doing what they’re supposed to do: save water. The toilets reduced the city’s annual water use by 20 million gallons, but they have had the unintended consequence of causing sewage problems. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months. The city has already spent …
Typically when the government and business get together, it’s the consumer who ends up paying. So when Washington, D.C.’s Department of the Environment (DDOE) teamed up with Patuxent Environmental Group (PEG) and other contractors to provide “free” energy audits, of course it didn’t end well for the consumer. But most residents didn’t realize that PEG would place liens on their houses for not paying for the audit. Let’s start from the beginning. For the past two years, the D.C. government has been contracting out to inspectors to investigate where homeowners …
Some households just can’t afford to save energy. When the upfront costs of new light bulbs exceed the savings from using less electricity, people will stick with the old ones. That also appears to be the case for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In spite of supporting regulations that will force all Americans to switch out old light bulbs for more expensive new ones (the good old incandescent bulb will be illegal in 2012), it seems that the DOE itself finds that it’s too much trouble and too expensive …
For environmentalists to get the carbon dioxide cuts they desire, they need people to dramatically change their behavior. After all, the goal of cap and trade is to increase the cost of energy (85% of which comes from carbon-emitting fossil fuels), in order for demand to fall. But the radical environmental ideas extend well beyond cap and trade and come from all parts of the globe. This is nothing more than a group of elitists who believe they possess a moral authority to tell others how to live. The latest …
This week The House of Representatives is set to vote on a, $6.6 billion home energy efficiency bill commonly referred to as “cash for caulkers.” The plan would give rebates to homeowners willing to green their homes by installing new windows and retrofitting homes energy efficient upgrades. The legislation, H.R. 5019, is being sold as a win for the economy, the planet and consumers. Its supporters of say it will create jobs and lower both greenhouse gas emissions and electric bills through less energy usage. But the old “If it’s …
Kudos to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) for recognizing that current “rhetoric and legislation [which] are focused primarily at climate change” are out of step with the concerns of most Americans. A January poll by Pew Research Center found “dealing with global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority.” The Senator frames his new approach in this way:
President Obama declared in the State of the Union address that the United States must be a leader in clean energy production. Why? “Because I’m convinced that the country that leads in clean energy is also going to be the country that leads in the global economy,” the president reiterated today in a speech at Savannah Technical College. That’s a good reason if it were guaranteed to be true, but doesn’t it depend on the cost? If a manufacturer in another country can produce these technologies more cheaply than a …
Green jobs have been the foundation to any of President Obama’s jobs speeches. “Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future,” he said in a speech last month. We’ve long argued that subsidizing jobs comes at the expense of others and will result in net job losses. Sunil Sharan, director of the Smart Grid Initiative at GE from 2008 to 2009, details in the Washington Post how smart metering will create jobs but destroy many more in the process: It typically takes …
President Obama called on the federal government, the nation’s largest energy consumer, to its increase energy efficiency and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2020. According to the White House if the targets are met they “would reduce federal energy consumption by the equivalent of 646 trillion BTUs, equal to 205 million barrels of oil, and taking 17 million cars off the road for one year, according to a statement from the White House press office. That would save $8 billion to $11 billion in energy costs …
According to the Wall Street Journal, while speaking on “the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu had this gem when speaking about you, the American people, and your embrace of his green jobs and global warming agenda: The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is. Once again, the Obama Administration has decided to name call, condescend and demean the opposition rather than …
