Morning Energy News – April 27, 2011

IER’s Dan Kish puts the gas price debate in perspective by calling out President Obama’s stance on fossil fuels  Daily Caller (4/26/11) reports: Seizing upon comments made this week by House Speaker John Boehner that Congress should “be looking into” quelling subsidies for oil and gas companies, President Obama sent a letter to House and Senate leaders urging them to pass his proposal to end tax credits for oil companies and transfer them to other companies that produce energy through other means…Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, an oil industry think tank, said Obama has long supported policies that would increase the price of oil, including limits on oil production in the United States, and is now pointing fingers at the oil companies for high gas prices…“Now that his plan is bearing expensive fruit Americans don’t like, his attempt to shift blame away from his actions is pathetically akin to what we would expect from Hugo Chavez or some other third world populist.  His chickens are coming home to roost,” Kish said.

Greenies must own stock in oil companies; why else would they be driving up the price?  CNBC (4/26/11) reports: What’s good for Big Oil is good for America Or at least that’s the message from Big Oil this week, as five major oil companies prepare to unveil quarterly earnings numbers that are expected to show major profits at a time when Americans are facing rising gas prices at the pump…But the Obama administration has another take: If the oil companies are doing so well, maybe they ought to give up about $44 billion worth of federal subsidies over the next ten years…President Obama ratcheted up his push Tuesday with a letter to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders asking them to remove the subsidies…”Our outdated tax laws currently provide the oil and gas industry more than $4 billion per year in these subsidies, even though oil prices are high and the industry is projected to report outsized profits this quarter,” Obama said…The Obama administration now has an unlikely potential ally on that front: Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, who said this week that he’s open to reexamining the oil company subsidies even if he’s not ready to commit to axing them just yet.
 
What Boehner should have said: let’s end all energy subsidies The Hill (4/26/11) reports: White House economic adviser Gene Sperling made the case Tuesday for eliminating a series of oil industry tax breaks, part of a ramped-up push by the administration to focus on the issue in light of rising gas prices…“At a time when we are asking our entire country to engage in shared sacrifice, we have to ask ourselves whether we can still afford $43 billion over 10 years on subsidies that do not seem to be efficient or needed or consistent with our G20 commitments and obligations,” Sperling said during an energy conference on Washington on Tuesday afternoon…Sperling’s comments came about an hour after President Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders calling for quick passage of legislation eliminating the tax breaks…The White House is hoping to capitalize on remarks by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) Monday in which he appeared to open the door to supporting the elimination of the tax breaks. Boehner said he may be open to cutting the tax breaks for some of the larger oil companies.
 
Turns out Moses did not lead the Israelites to the only place in the Middle East without oil — oil shale deposits could make Israel energy independent Reuters (4/27/11) reports: A subsidiary of U.S.-firm IDT Energy (IDT.N) is leading a push in Israel to tap into the country’s vast deposits of oil shale…The company, Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI), has already invested “tens of millions of dollars” in preparing a pilot project it hopes to launch by the end of 2011, CEO Relik Shafir told Reuters…”If successful, in a few years IEI could start producing 50,000 barrels of oil a day, or 20 percent of Israel’s consumption, for 30 years,” Shafir said…The division of IDT that owns IEI is called Genie Energy, and it has already brought investments from financier Jacob Rothschild and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Together they own a 5.5 percent stake worth $11 million, according to a company statement from November…Murdoch, upon joining Genie Energy’s advisory board last year, said the group would “spur a global, geo-political paradigm shift by moving a major portion of new oil production to America, Israel and other Western-oriented democracies.”

 
Two cheers for Florida taxpayers — solar and biomass energy producers mourn the death of their rent seeking bill Miami Herald (4/27/11) reports: Solar and biomass energy companies mourned the loss of a sure job development opportunity Tuesday as the state Senate’s budget chief put a spear through a bill to spur renewable energy in Florida…“I’d pronounce that one dead,’’ said Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee after he indefinitely postponed a bill that would have allowed Florida’s largest electric companies to raise electric rates as much as $375 million a year for five years to develop alternative energy…”I think it’s a terrible idea,’’ said Alexander, a citrus grower. “I can’t believe we’d ask Florida to pay $1 billion in additional assessments with zero regulatory oversight. I think that’s fundamentally not right.”…This is the third year the bill has been the priority of Florida Power & Light, and it is the third time the bill has died. The only thing new this year is that the Koch brothers-backed Americans For Prosperity joined in the chorus of opponents to argue against the bill.

Morning Energy News – April 26, 2011

Keep up the pressure — it looks like Bromwich’s blow out preventer is about to blow! Platts (4/25/11) reports: Michael Bromwich, the chief regulator for US offshore drilling, on Monday waded into Washington’s growing debate about high oil prices, saying his agency’s pace of reviewing oil and gas exploration plans has no relation to the rising cost of gasoline…”Even if we permitted the hell out of everything tomorrow — every pending permit, some permits that haven’t even been filed yet — it would not have a material effect on gas prices,” Bromwich said. “That’s the simple, clear reality.” …High oil prices have started to become a top talking point among politicians in Washington as the national average for gasoline nears $4/gal ahead of the peak summer driving season…Speaking at a Public Citizen event, Bromwich — who heads the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — said the administration of President Barack Obama has tried to make clear in recent weeks that high oil and gasoline prices reflect global trends…”The problem is, not enough people are listening,” Bromwich said. “You can’t drill your way to lower oil prices. It’s a world market. We have a very limited impact on that.”…”The fact is that stepping up the rapidity with which we grant drilling permits — applications to drill — may make some people feel better, but it will not have a material affect on gas prices,” he continued. “That is a fact. It’s an economic fact.”

Shocker — Employment Prevention Agency takes their ball and goes home, leaving Shell in the wind as Americans suffer at the pump Fox News (4/25/11) reports: Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight…Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining similar air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take about 45 days. He’s especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful for the communities we work in.”…The closest village to where Shell proposed to drill is Kaktovik, Alaska. It is one of the most remote places in the United States. According to the latest census, the population is 245 and nearly all of the residents are Alaska natives. The village, which is 1 square mile, sits right along the shores of the Beaufort Sea, 70 miles away from the proposed off-shore drill site…The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.
 
Gingrich has corn on his face…paystubs tie former speaker to ethanol lobby even though he disputes the claim iWatch (4/25/11) reports: “I am not a lobbyist for ethanol,” Newt Gingrich declared in a mid-winter spat with the editors of The Wall Street Journal over his support for government subsidies for alternative fuel…But Gingrich was a hired consultant to a major ethanol lobbying group—at more than $300,000 a year…According to IRS records, the ethanol group Growth Energy paid Gingrich’s consulting firm $312,500 in 2009.The former House Speaker was the organization’s top-paid consultant, according to the records. His pay was one of the group’s largest single expenditures, as it took in and spent about $11 million to promote ethanol and to lobby for federal incentives for its use…In a Growth Energy publication, Gingrich was listed as a consultant who offered advice on “strategy and communication issues” and who “will speak positively on ethanol related topics to media.”

As interesting and useful as Nisbet’s work is, it avoids locking up on the most important problem with cap and trade:  it would have cost a lot and not have achieved anything E&E News (4/25/11) reports: A little-known associate professor at American University kicked a hornet’s nest last week when he released a study that took aim at environmentalists’ view of themselves as underdogs, outgunned in financing and exposure by “Big Oil,” “Big Coal” and other industries interested in maintaining the regulatory status quo…The report by Matthew Nisbet, an associate professor of communications, was targeted by the liberal Center for American Progress even before its planned release last Wednesday for its section arguing that environmentalists have caught up with or surpassed their adversaries in the smoke stack industries when it comes to lobbying, advertising and campaign cash. CAP fellow Joseph Romm posted multiple blog entries shooting down Nisbet’s findings one by one (Greenwire, April 19)…At the same time, the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America posted entries that questioned Nisbet’s choice not to analyze climate change coverage by television networks when calculating whether there is a media bias against climate science. They particularly questioned his decision to exclude Fox, which is widely viewed by the Republicans who shunned the 2009 and 2010 congressional efforts to pass cap and trade.
 
President Obama has changed consumer habits — people are driving less, but they’re not happy about it and they know who gets the credit: 7 out of 10 blame Obama Washington Post (4/26/11) reports: Soaring gasoline prices are biting into household incomes and nibbling at Americans’ fuel consumption — and support for President Obama, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll…About six in 10 respondents said they had cut back on driving because of rising fuel prices, and seven in 10 said that high pump prices are causing financial hardship…Obama, like previous presidents in times of high oil prices, is taking a hit. Only 39 percent of those who call gas prices a “serious financial hardship” approve of the way he is doing his job, and 33 percent of them say he’s doing a good job on the economy…The Energy Information Administration said Monday that gas prices climbed last week to $3.88 a gallon, up 81 cents since the start of the year. That is the highest pump price since August 2008, before the financial meltdown.
 
Lawyer up: today starts the legal battle between the environmentalists and the taxpayers New York Times (4/25/11) reports: The latest phase in the legal fight over offshore drilling permits that was kick-started by last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster begins this week with two back-to-back arguments in a federal appeals court in New Orleans…Tomorrow, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will consider two related cases concerning permits that were approved around the time of the April 20 explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico…Both cases arise from allegations made by environmentalists that the government violated environmental laws in approving permits both before and in the immediate aftermath of the spill…They are just two of several cases on the issue of offshore drilling permits that are pending both in federal district court and in the appeals court, some brought by environmental groups that think the government is moving too quickly to approve permits and some by companies in the oil and gas industry that believe the government is unreasonably delaying issuing permits…The cases being argued before the 5th Circuit tomorrow morning both arise from the renewed interest shown by environmental groups in the drilling process in light of the spill.

Morning Energy News – April 19, 2011

It’s amazing to watch the transformation of an entrepreneur into a rent seeker Business Week (4/19/11) reports: Google Inc. has invested another $100 million in a clean energy project. The funding for the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon brings Google’s total clean energy investments to more than $350 million and represents the company’s latest attempt to support reliable new ways to power its expanding data centers…Data centers, or server farms, are notorious power hogs. And Google has many of them. The simple act of typing in a Google search taps into Google’s computing resources — and the grid that supplies energy to those machines…Google also invested last year in a project to line the sea floor off the East Coast with electrical cables to send power from offshore wind farms back onto land. Building capacity is one of the major costs of clean energy projects. Google has also invested in solar energy. 

Now serving Columbia. I wonder what number the U.S. pulled?  CNS News (4/19/11) reports: The U.S. Export-Import Bank, an independent agency of the federal government, is now planning a $2.84-billion loan for a massive project to expand and upgrade an oil refinery–in Cartagena, Colombia…The money would go to Reficar, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ecopetrol, the Colombian national oil company…“This is part of a $5.18 billion refinery and upgrade project in Cartagena, Colombia supplying petroleum products to the domestic and export markets,” the Export-Import Bank said in a statement…The U.S. government-controlled bank says the $2.84-billion in financing it plans to undertake will be the second largest project it has ever done. The largest was $3 billion in financing for a liquid natural gas project in Papua New Guinea.
 
Double stamp, no take-backs: UK solar companies cry foul in court saying the government promised subsidies and they need that money in order to stay in business Bloomberg (4/19/11) reports: Low Carbon Solar U.K. Ltd., Element Power Ltd. and eight other companies and people asked a British court to review U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne’s decision to reexamine solar subsidies…The government in March said it may cut subsidies for bigger solar projects by as much as 72 percent after announcing a comprehensive review in February of feed-in tariffs, or guaranteed prices paid for electricity from renewables. The ministry Huhne leads wants to prevent large solar farms from taking money earmarked for rooftop installations…The companies said today in an e-mailed statement that the government had set “clear expectations” that a first review wouldn’t take place until 2012, with subsidies changing in 2013. They also said the Department of Energy and Climate Change never said what the trigger would be for an early review…“In pulling back on a commitment to support solar energy, the government will cause the abandonment of hundreds of community-scale schemes,” said Mark Shorrock, chief executive of Low Carbon Solar. “The cost of not getting this right now, aside from the government meeting its climate change targets, include the creation of new jobs, a diversified income for farmers and landowners, reduced energy costs for businesses and the provision of more secure and reliable energy for the U.K.”
 
Global Warming’s new celebrity spokesman, Charles Manson, chastises us for not putting “the trees back that we’ve butchered.” Daily Mail (4/18/11) reports: Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders – to speak out about global warming…The infamous killer, who started championing environmental causes from behind bars, bemoaned the ‘bad things’ being done to environment in a rambling phone interview from his Californian jail cell…’Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere…’If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem…’ he added, trailing off.
 
Possible ice breaker for Secretaries Salazar and Clinton, “Name all the areas of the world you’ve shut down for energy production” The Hill (4/19/11) reports: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are both slated to attend the May 12 meeting of the intergovernmental Arctic Council in Greenland, Salazar told reporters Monday…“One of the items we will be discussing in that forum will be how we move forward with oil-and-gas development,” Salazar said at a press conference on drilling…The intergovernmental council is made up of nations that border the Arctic Circle including Russia, the U.S., Greenland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It’s designed to enhance cooperation and coordination among Arctic states…Salazar’s actions and comments on Arctic development will be closely watched amid uncertainty about the extent to which Interior will allow oil-and-gas drilling in a fragile region believed to hold massive energy resources…Royal Dutch Shell has for years been seeking federal permission to develop billions of dollars worth of leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s northern coast, and other companies are also planning exploration. Multiple bills on Capitol Hill are aimed at expediting development in the region

Morning Energy News – April 18, 2011

The unstoppable can-do American spirit collides with the immoveable U.S. Government — Shell expects to drill in Alaska in 2012 Wall Street Journal (4/15/11) reports: Royal Dutch Shell PLC expects to start drilling in Alaska’s Arctic waters in the summer of next year and have in place an oil-containment system specifically designed for the area ready at the same time, the head of the company’s U.S. operations said Friday…”Our aspiration is to drill in the 2012 season,” Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Co., the U.S. unit of the Anglo-Dutch giant, told Dow Jones Newswires in a interview. “We are hopeful, but also cautions.”..Shell still has to obtain a number of permits from the federal government in order to go ahead with its $3.5 billion investment to drill in the state’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Shell’s plans have been delayed by environmental lawsuits and permit issues on top of calls for better spill prevention and containment capabilities following BP PLC’s oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year…Mr. Odum said the company will wait until about September to see the amount of progress in the permitting process before making a final decision to start deploying the system needed to drill next summer. “It takes about six months to build up the capacity you need to start the program,” Mr. Odum said. “This is a very significant resource for the country, which is worth pursuing, and we are focused on getting it done.”..Shell is planning to have in place an oil-containment system specifically designed to work in the cold-climate conditions of the Arctic by the time drilling starts, Mr. Odum said.

Good news is that Government Motors is going to sell a Volt. The bad news is that it’s replacing the one that burned down a garage Fox News (4/15/11) reports: Fire officials suspect an electric hybrid car may have sparked an overnight blaze in a garage in Barkhamsted on Center Hill Road…. Officials said they can’t rule out that the couple’s brand new Chevy Volt hybrid had something to do with the blaze…Homeowner Storm Connors and his wife, Dee, said they awoke to the sound of a smoke alarm around 4 a.m. The couple said they have lived in the home for nearly 40 years. They built it and raised their children there, so when the flames took over their attached garage Thursday morning, burning it down to its beams, the couple started to panic. They said they were worried they were going to lose their home and the memories inside…”I walked outside and looked in the garage door and it was flaming,” Dee Connors said. “I grabbed a pocketbook so I’d have a cellphone and a driver’s license and a jacket and a pair of slacks. I had no shoes, my feet were freezing.”
 
Instead of listening to kids who are supported by their parents, the President should be listening to American workers who are feeling the pocketbook squeeze at the pump The Hill (4/17/11) reports:  A dozen climate change activists expecting a discussion with White House staffers got a surprise meeting with the president himself…A dozen young climate change activists expecting a discussion with White House staffers Friday instead got a meeting with President Obama himself…The surprise meeting came hours ahead of the April 15-18 Power Shift 2011 conference, which is slated to include criticism of a White House that some activists allege has not been aggressive enough on climate change…“We went thinking we would meet with senior staff and in walked Barack Obama,” said Courtney Hight, co-director of the Energy Action Coalition that organized the conference, which opened Friday night…“Young people got to sit down at a table in the West Wing and have a meeting with the president and share what our priorities are and talk about solutions, and we talked about the impact of fossil fuels in our communities, and how they can wreak havoc,” Hight said onstage at the conference of largely collegiate activists.
 
This man has swagger Wall Street Journal (4/16/11) reports: The Chevron CEO is a rare breed these days: an unapologetic oil man. For decades—going back to Jimmy Carter—politicians have been peddling an America free of fossil fuels. Mr. Obama has taken that to an unprecedented level, closing off more acreage to drilling, pouring money into green energy, pushing new oil company taxes, instituting anticarbon regulations. America is going backward on affordable energy, even as oil hits $110 a barrel…As for biofuels, “we would need to consume land the size of states” to hit the country’s current ethanol targets. Chevron is investigating biofuels, but Mr. Watson says the “economics aren’t there” yet. Unlike many CEOs, Mr. Watson insists on products that can prosper without federal subsidies, which he believes are costly and lacking in transparency when “consumer pockets are tight, government pockets are tight…Bottom line: “We’re going to need oil and gas and coal for a long time if America wants to keep the lights on.”
 
Problem: supply of crude oil from Middle East is unstable. Solution: drill for oil in the U.S. and import from Canada Bloomberg (4/18/11) reports: Crude prices currently include a premium of $15 to $20 a barrel, OPEC’s Secretary General said, commenting on the commodity’s 19 percent gain this year, driven by rising unrest in oil-producing nations in the Middle East…Oil officials from Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iran joined Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, in saying there is no shortage of fuel in the market…“I can’t say the market is oversupplied, but the market is adequately supplied and our production in March is almost the same as our production in December, even though one of our member countries is out of production,” OPEC’s Abdalla el-Badri told reporters today in Kuwait. “Yes, the price is a concern.”..Additional shipments to make up for halts in Libyan output has been met by a lack of buyers, el-Badri said, when asked if the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will decide to raise production when it meets in June…Crude fell as much as 1.1 percent in New York to $108.47 a barrel today after Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said yesterday that the global “market is oversupplied” with crude.
 
NYT asked and answered their own rhetorical question, but here’s the kicker: they expect us to believe them on their word New York Times (4/18/11) reports: A year after BP’s Macondo well blew out, killing 11 men and spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the much-maligned federal agency responsible for policing offshore drilling has been remade, with a tough new director, an awkward new name and a sheaf of stricter safety rules. It is also trying to put some distance between itself and the industry it regulates… But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore…“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”..Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be — promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.
 
Two cheers. When in comes to government-induced green energy investment, the U.S. doesn’t waste as much money as Germany or China Global Post (4/18/11) reports: Germany and BEIJING, China — In the rough and blustery North Sea, almost 30 miles off Germany’s coast, 12 wind turbines tower over the water, with rotors longer than football fields…Like most wind turbines, those that make up the Alpha Ventus Offshore Wind Farm have gearboxes that transmit the power of the rotors to much faster-spinning cogs that generate electricity…The strain from wind turbulence makes these gearboxes the most fragile part of the turbines and a true engineering headache…Six of the Alpha Ventus gearboxes are made by Renk, a 130-year-old engineering company based in Augsburg, southern Germany. The three decades in which Renk has been involved with wind turbines haven’t always been easy, said Toni Weiss, general manager of Renk’s industrial gear division. But he estimates the firm is now five to seven years ahead of most rivals.

Morning Energy News – April 6, 2011

Senate to Vote on Plan to Reign In EPA Today–Unless Vote Gets Postponed Again… The Hill (4/5/11) reports: The Senate will vote on a GOP-backed plan to kill Environmental Protection Agency climate change rules Wednesday afternoon, according to Democrats and a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)…Lawmakers will vote on McConnell’s amendment to small-business legislation, as well as several Democratic alternatives. The amendments need 60 votes to pass…The GOP-led EPA amendment mirrors legislation that the House will debate Wednesday as well. The Senate Democratic alternatives would limit or delay EPA rules without stripping the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-W.Va.) plan that would delay regulation of power plants, refineries and other facilities for two years. All the plans face very high hurdles to winning 60 votes…A caveat: The votes have appeared imminent several times in recent weeks without materializing. Stay tuned.

What has the world come to–the Communists in Cuba understand the value of domestically produced energy, but the President of the United States does not Associated Press (4/5/11) reports: Cuba on Tuesday announced plans to drill five deepwater oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico beginning this summer, expressing confidence that its efforts will be rewarded with major new energy finds…”We’re about to move to the drilling phase,” said Manuel Marrero, an official with the government authority tasked with overseeing Cuba’s oil sector…”We’re all really hopeful that we will be able to discover large reserves of oil and gas,” said Marrero, who added that the ventures would be undertaken with the help of unspecified foreign companies…He said the deepwater wells were to be drilled between 2011 and 2013, and would be in waters ranging in depth between 400 meters (a quarter mile) and 1,500 meters (1.6 miles). He did not specify which countries would be among the foreign partners working with Havana on the project.

Morning Energy News – April 5, 2011

Lisa Jackson channels her inner Scooby Doo villain and says, “If it weren’t for you pesky free market advocates, we would have gotten away with it!”  New York Times (4/4/11) reports: A Virginia state lawmaker caused a stir in February when he admitted that his resolution declaring U.S. EPA’s effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions a “regulatory train wreck” was written by the coal industry…Republican Delegate Will Morefield’s resolution said EPA regulations would have potentially “devastating consequences,” called for a “comprehensive study” of their impact on the economy and urged Congress to place a two-year moratorium on new air pollution regulations….Morefield’s resolution was drawn almost word-for-word from model legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which touts its access to almost 2,000 state legislators. The Washington, D.C.-based group claims credit for advancing legislation that it says has undermined climate science and environmental regulation in several states since the late 1990s….ALEC has been focusing of late on EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations and regional climate initiatives. At least eight state legislative bodies have adopted resolutions this year urging Congress to limit EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gases — all of which came directly from ALEC model legislation….Legislators in more than 10 other states have introduced similar resolutions, according to Clinton Woods, the director of ALEC’s energy, environment and agriculture task force.
 
Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Whoa oh, oh…Wind is in love with money and not with saving the world Wall Street Journal (4/5/11) reports: After years of blustery growth, wind power is facing a blow-back in some of its major markets. It is reeling from lackluster electricity demand in many mature economies, rock-bottom prices for competing natural-gas in the U.S. and uncertainty throughout much of the world about government subsidies. Companies that make wind turbines are slashing production at some plants and reconsidering previous expansion…Wind power is the biggest and cheapest of the renewable-energy sources now attracting major investment, from solar to biofuels to ocean waves, analysts say. Bigger blades, taller towers and slicker software all have improved the efficiency of the massive, pinwheel-style turbines that now dot landscapes from Iowa to India. The uncertain outlook for nuclear power after the Japan disaster should boost wind power’s appeal…Yet wind remains a tiny slice of the energy pie. In the U.S, it generated about 2% of electricity in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says. World-wide, it generated about 1% of electricity in 2008, the most recent global numbers available, the International Energy Agency says.
 
When it comes to shale gas, Huff Po writers pay homage to Mark Twain who said, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please” Huffington Post (4/5/11) reports:  We are desperately awaiting good news, but the bad news involving energy steadily worsens. It was a year ago this week that 29 miners perished in West Virginia’s Upper Branch coal mine and we collectively asked how much sooty coal we want to keep burning. Soon after, the Gulf of Mexico was carpeted with oozing gunk for months, forcing us to question whether offshore drilling is viable following the worst oil spill in history. That tragedy had only begun to recede when the Middle East began to explode and we once again confronted the vulnerability of our tenuous energy supplies. Then, as if Japan’s double-punch earthquake and tsunami wasn’t horrific enough, meltdown of the crippled nuclear power plant began. These events in rapid succession reminded us that every source of traditional energy is its own Hobson’s choice fraught with danger…All of these events together made people – and energy markets – increasingly jittery. Most Americans don’t make the connection until their pocketbooks are affected, such as when fuel prices surge, along with air fares, transportation costs and everything else. But Americans don’t want to hear about the problem; rather, our can-do attitude and American ingenuity demand a solution…Right when energy is on everybody’s mind, the biggest-circulation news magazine rides to our rescue with a compelling cover story “This Rock Could Power the World: Why Shale Can Solve the Energy Crisis.” It proclaims that natural gas offers us a whole century of relatively clean energy.
 
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain — the same guy who didn’t see the financial meltdown coming is now telling us not to worry about rising energy prices CNBC (4/5/11) reports: Concerns over global growth were also fueled by a survey published in the Nikkei business newspaper which showed economists expect the Japanese economy to contract by 0.6 percent for the January-March quarter and by 2.6 percent in the three months to the end of June…They expect growth quarter in the world’s third-largest economy to return in the July to September, the survey found….Back in the US, investors were digesting comments made by Federal Reserve President Ben Bernanke Monday evening which suggested the Fed is not yet ready to start tightening monetary policy despite an improving economy…Bernanke said a recent rise in prices was driven by a spike in global commodity prices and was unlikely to persist…The Fed releases the minutes of the latest Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting at 2 pm New York time…The report could offer further clues on whether the Fed is likely to raise rates in the near term.
 
The beatings will continue until morale improves — Republican senators want to know where Obama is getting the money for his high speed rail The Hill (4/4/11) reports: Twenty-two Republican senators are asking President Obama to explain where he would find the revenue to pay for his proposed increase in transportation funding…The Republicans said they hoped the White House would not consider raising the gas tax to offset the costs of the 2012 budget request…”To communicate to our constituents whether or not the $435 billion trust fund represents a large gas tax increase, we respectfully request details on how the Administration calculated the amount of revenue it envisions for the ‘Bipartisan financing for Transportation Trust Fund,’ ” the senators wrote…”As energy prices continue to increase, we are hopeful that this new revenue stream proposed by the Administration would not be a new gas tax on American consumers.”