The Wall Street Journal reports: A massive natural-gas discovery here in northern Louisiana heralds a big shift in the nation’s energy landscape. After an era of declining production, the U.S. is now swimming in natural gas. Even conservative estimates suggest the Louisiana discovery — known as the Haynesville Shale, for the dense rock formation that contains the gas — could hold some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil, or 18 years’ worth of current U.S. oil production. Some industry executives …
In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman writes: “I cringe when “green economy” enthusiasts insist that protecting the environment would be all gain, no pain.” We feel his pain. But then Krugman goes on to write: Consumers would end up poorer than they would have been without a climate-change policy. But how much poorer? Not much, say careful researchers, like those at the Environmental Protection Agency …. But the EPA made some revealing assumptions about the relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth in their study. Specifically, to …
In just over a dozen months, the global economic recession has succeeded where decades of carbon cap and trade policies have failed: reducing global carbon emissions. The USA Today reports: From the United States to Europe to China, the global economic crisis has forced offices to close and factories to cut back. That means less use of fossil fuels such as coal to make energy. Fossil-fuel burning, which creates carbon dioxide, is the primary human contributor to global warming. A recession-driven drop in emissions “is good for the environment,” says …
The Obama administration’s Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has had a very busy first six weeks. His agency, which handles most domestic energy leasing, has already canceled many onshore oil and natural gas leases. Interior has also slowed to a crawl any progress on new offshore oil leases, and has done the same for oil shale in Colorado. The pro-energy promise of 2008, when President Bush and Congress belatedly began to respond to skyrocketing pump prices by allowing increased domestic production, has already been reversed. In this short span, …
Michael Schellenberger and Michael Nordhaus already have taken plenty of heat from the enviro/left for their book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Their latest article in the American Prospect is not going to mend any fences. Schellenberger and Nordhaus write: Like conservatives who see tax cuts as the solution to all problems, greens are now offering carbon auctions and energy taxes as the answer to the economic crisis. “Capping global warming pollution and auctioning off the pollution rights will inject $150 billion into …
The left is getting absolutely destroyed in the debate on the Senate floor over global warming. Roll Call reports that Democratic staffers are complaining that leadership “is walking us off a cliff” on the issue. Far left activists report they are hearing similar things from their allies in Congress. The left is quickly discovering that Americans are not eager to pay higher gas and energy prices in exchange for completely symbolic action on global warming. Conservatives in the House have been paying attention to the debate as well and they …
