Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Whenever a new environmental regulation gets proposed, there’s one thing you can count on: the affected industry will start cranking out research showing that the cost of compliance is so astronomical that it will put them out of business. It happens every time. Then, when the new regs take effect anyway, guess what? It turns out they aren’t really all that expensive after all. The country gets cleaner and the economy keeps humming along normally. Hard to believe, no?
Apologies for the spoiler, but can you guess what’s happening now that President Obama’s new carbon rules for power plants are about to take effect? Mitch “War on Coal” McConnell has been issuing hysterical warnings about these regulations for years, but the Washington Post reports that—sorry, did you say something? You’ve already guessed, have you?
More striking is what has happened since: Kentucky’s government and electric utilities have quietly positioned themselves to comply with the rule — something state officials expect to do with relatively little effort….“We can meet it,” Kentucky Energy and Environment Secretary Leonard Peters, speaking at a climate conference, said of the EPA’s mandate.
The story is the same across much of the country as the EPA prepares to roll out what is arguably the biggest and most controversial environmental regulation of the Obama presidency….Despite dire warnings and harsh political rhetoric, many states are already on track to meet their targets, even before the EPA formally announces them, interviews and independent studies show.
Iowa is expected to meet half of its carbon-reduction goal by next year, just with the wind-power projects already planned or in construction. Nevada is on track to meet 100 percent of its goal without additional effort, thanks to several huge solar-energy farms the state’s electricity utilities were already planning to build. From the Great Lakes to the Southwest, electric utilities were projecting huge drops in greenhouse-gas emissions as they switch from burning coal to natural gas — not because of politics or climate change, but because gas is now cheaper.
“It’s frankly the norm,” said Malcolm Woolf, a former Maryland state energy official and now senior vice president for Advanced Energy Economy….“We’ve yet to find a state that is going to have a real technical challenge meeting this.”
Try to contain your surprise.
Taken from:
Surprise! EPA’s New Power Plant Rules Aren’t Going to Destroy America After All.
By John Lighton 22 Jul 2015commentsShare
The GOP-controlled Senate Finance Committee did right by the clean energy industry yesterday when, as part of a big package of tax break extensions, it cleared the way for the renewal of a key tax credit that supports wind power.
The wind credit was effectively killed last year when an entire $85 billion package of tax breaks failed to make it through the Senate — in part because of GOP opposition to this particular wind energy credit.
In yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee vote, the tax credit package was approved by a vote of 23-3. GOP Sen. Pat Toomey (Penn.) was one of the naysayers on the wind credit, arguing that the it meddles with the energy economy. “We are simply picking winners and losers,” he said during a debate last year on the topic. (Fossil fuel companies get many more billions in tax credits and deductions, but whatever.)
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, however, pushed for the wind credit extension. Iowa produces quite a bit of wind power. “I’ve worked to provide as much certainty as possible to grow the domestic wind industry,” Grassley wrote in a letter to the committee chair earlier this month. “I know firsthand the boom and bust cycle that exists for renewable energy producers when Congress fails to extend these critically important tax incentives.”
Tax breaks like these, which legislators don’t want to make permanent but also don’t want to eliminate altogether, often get renewed en masse in a vote that proves controversial every year. It creates quite a bit of uncertainty for affected industries; investors, for example, are more hesitant about putting their money into wind energy when they aren’t sure how taxes will affect wind producers’ bottom lines.
The package also includes tax credits for a range of industries, including some for big banks and one for Broadway musical producers. The credits would be assured through 2016, when the fight to renew them would begin again.
What’s next for this package of tax breaks isn’t clear. The full Senate has to vote on the package approved by the Senate Finance Committee. The House is considering a similar bill, but may end up doing it’s own thing: The Republican majority there wants to make some breaks permanent, but the wind energy tax credit, opposed by many conservatives, likely won’t be one of those. So who knows if the wind credit will ever make it into law again. Regardless: Progress!
Please
to view the comments.
Find this article interesting?
Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series
More –
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Apparently this is Let’s Make a Deal week. First the Greeks, now the Iranians. The deal with Iran restricts their supply of uranium, cuts down the number of centrifuges they can run, forces them to account for past activity, and puts in place strict verification measures. So when does it take effect: Here’s the Washington Post:
The agreement will not take effect until Iran is certified to have met its terms — something Iran says will happen in a matter of weeks but that Western diplomats have said could take at least until the end of the year.
Hmmm. That’s not necessarily a good start. So when will sanctions be lifted?
From the Post: A senior Obama administration official said that, until Iranian compliance is verified, an 18-month old interim agreement restricting Iran’s activities, and sanctions, will remain in place.
From the New York Times: Diplomats also came up with unusual procedure to “snap back” the sanctions against Iran if an eight-member panel determines that Tehran is violating the nuclear provisions.
The members of the panel are Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, the European Union and Iran itself. A majority vote is required, meaning that Russia, China and Iran could not collectively block action. The investigation and referral process calls for a time schedule of 65 days, tight compared to the years the atomic energy agency has taken to pursue suspicious activity.
And here’s the Guardian with a bullet list of the main points of the agreement:
Iran will reduce its enrichment capacity by two-thirds. It will stop using its underground facility at Fordow for enriching uranium.
Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium will be reduced to 300kg, a 96% reduction. It will achieve this reduction either by diluting it or shipping it out of the country.
The core of the heavy water reactor in Arak will be removed, and it will be redesigned in such a way that it will not produce significant amounts of plutonium.
Iran will allow UN inspectors to enter sites, including military sites, when the inspectors have grounds to believe undeclared nuclear activity is being carried out there. It can object but a multinational commission can override any objections by majority vote. After that Iran will have three days to comply. Inspectors will only come from countries with diplomatic relations with Iran, so no Americans.
Once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified that Iran has taken steps to shrink its programme, UN, US and EU sanctions will be lifted.
Restrictions on trade in conventional weapons will last another five years, and eight years in the case of ballistic missile technology.
If there are allegations that Iran has not met its obligations, a joint commission will seek to resolve the dispute for 30 days. If that effort fails it would be referred to the UN security council, which would have to vote to continue sanctions relief. A veto by a permanent member would mean that sanctions are reimposed. The whole process would take 65 days.
Overall, the deal seems to address most of the issues brought up by skeptics. Sanctions won’t be lifted right away. There’s an expedited process to reimpose them if Iran cheats. Military sites will be open to inspectors. Conventional weapons bans will continue for five years.
Benjamin Netanyahu is nevertheless apoplectic, of course, but who cares? He would be no matter what the deal looked like. At first glance, though, it looks reasonable. And since President Obama can—and will—veto any congressional attempt to disapprove the agreement, it will take a two-thirds vote to torpedo it. Presumably Obama can manage to scrape up at least a third of Congress to support it, so it should be pretty safe. That vote will take place in about two months.
Visit site:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Coal-fired power plants are the single biggest driver of global climate change in the United States. That’s why President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is moving quickly to put the finishing touches on a new set of regulations, called the Clean Power Plan, that aim to reduce the nation’s overall carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030 by cracking down on emissions from the energy sector.
Unsurprisingly, many power companies—particularly those that rely on coal as their main source of fuel—are crying foul. Recently, one major coal company and a dozen coal-reliant states tried to block the new rules in federal court. (The court decided last month not to hear the challenge, since the rules haven’t yet been finalized.) And this week, executives from two of the country’s biggest power companies met with White House officials in an attempt to persuade them that the crackdown would be “too much too soon.”
As it turns out, those same two companies—Duke Energy and American Electric Power—emit more carbon pollution than any other power producers in the country. That’s according to a new report released from a coalition of environmental groups and power companies, which draws on public data from the EPA and the Energy Information Administration to reveal the carbon footprints of the 100 biggest power producers in the nation. Many of the names in the database, like AEP or California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, might be familiar from your monthly bill, depending on where you live. The list does leave out some big utilities, like New York’s Con Ed, that primarily distribute power they purchase wholesale from someone else. That said, the database offers a pretty comprehensive snapshot of the companies most responsible for producing climate-changing emissions in the US.
The chart below shows the top 10 climate offenders from the database, according to two different metrics, and where each company ranks nationwide in terms of total power production. The first chart shows total carbon dioxide emissions in 2013. Unsurprisingly, that list is comprised mostly of the country’s biggest power companies, such as Duke, Southern, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. These companies produce a huge amount of power, and much of it comes from coal. Duke, for example, gets about 45 percent of its power from coal; for AEP, it’s about 60 percent.
The second chart shows the companies that are the most carbon-intense—that is, the companies that emit the most carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated. Many of these are small, regional producers that rely almost exclusively on coal. While these companies generate relatively little power overall, what they do generate is exceptionally dirty, climate-wise. Big Rivers Electric, for example, provides power for a patch of western Kentucky with four coal-fired plants, the newest of which came online in 1986. Big Rivers declined to comment for this story. But a spokesperson for Great River Energy pointed out that the dataset may not fully represent a company’s portfolio, because it accounts only for power plants that the companies own and not for contracts with third-party wind and solar farms.
Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk
Take another look at the top chart. You might have noticed that while many of the country’s largest power producers appear on the list of major carbon polluters, a few big names are absent. That’s important, and it illustrates the huge climate benefit of using low-carbon fuels. In some cases, these companies have avoided significant carbon emissions because their energy generation portfolio is made up mostly of nuclear (which practically zero-carbon) and/or natural gas-fired plants (which release relatively little CO2). For example, the nation’s number-two power producer is Exelon, which gets 59 percent of its power from nuclear. The number-four producer, NextEra, gets 52 percent of its power from natural gas, 27 percent from nuclear, and 16 percent from wind. In other words, the carbon footprint ranking is essentially a proxy for which power companies are most reliant on coal.
There’s some good news in the data, as well. In the last few years, nationwide coal use has dropped precipitously. That’s mostly a product of market forces, rather than environmental regulation: Natural gas, made cheaper by the fracking boom, has displaced coal in power plants across the country. At the same time, renewable energy sources have boomed.
“What you see in this report is a significant shift to cleaner fuels,” said Derek Furstenwerth, a contributor to the report and the director of environmental services at Calpine, one of the country’s biggest power companies. Like NextEra, Calpine gets the bulk of its power from natural gas. Calpine has also emerged as a major proponent of Obama’s climate plan.
The shift away from coal has had a significant impact on emissions: Since 2008, carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector have dropped 12 percent. Other types of air emissions reported in the database are also way down, driven by regulations from the EPA that took effect prior to the Obama years. Emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide (both of which cause acid rain and other nasty environmental impacts) are down 74 percent and 80 percent, respectively, since 1990. The trends in those emissions offer a bit of a crystal ball into what will happen when the federal limits on carbon dioxide emissions kick in, said Dan Bakal, a contributor to the report and director of the electric power program at Ceres, a group that tracks environmental issues in the private sector.
“At the time, industry really thought reducing NOx and SO2 emissions was not going to be achievable and that it would be much more costly,” he said. “But they stepped up to the challenge and found ways to reduce emissions very cost-effectively. The same thing will happen with CO2.”
Just because carbon emissions are already on the decline, doesn’t mean Obama’s rules are unnecessary. The change isn’t happening fast enough to avert dangerous climate change, Bakal said. But the current trend does show that cleaning up the power sector is possible.
Complying with the Clean Power Plan “will be a bit of a stretch for the industry, which is appropriate for a regulation intended to put us on an improving path,” Furstenwerth said. “But we believe that it’s definitely achievable.”
View article:
Original article:
The flowering reefer industry is sucking up energy, and the city has no efficiency plans in place to mitigate the problem. Bruce Stanfield/Shutterstock Since states like California, Washington, and Colorado have adopted laws allowing for the legal growth and sale of marijuana, a new reefer madness has taken shape. In some areas, the bud industry has been credited for performing “economic miracles.” In others, it’s to blame for everything from pollution and deforestation to water shortages. And while it has been touted as a possible gateway to reducing racial arrest disparities, that has not been the case so far in Colorado. Charge another social problem to the weed game: It’s getting too high on cities’ energy supply. At least that’s the case in Denver, where the recreational marijuana industry is reportedly sucking up more of the city’s electricity than it may have bargained for. Colorado became the first state to legalize recreational weed use in 2012, and the commercial industry has grown exponentially ever since. But that blooming market has placed a huge burden on the grid that distributes electricity throughout the state, particularly in Denver, where the largest cluster of growing facilities exist. The city’s 354 weed-cultivation facilities sucked up 200 million kilowatts of electricity last year, up from 86 million at 351 facilities in 2012, according to The Denver Post. Read the rest at CityLab. Visit source: Weed Growers Are a Drag on Denver’s Energy Supply
See original article here:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Rooftop solar power systems cost a lot less these days than they did five or 10 years ago, and with many solar companies now offering leases and loans, it’s safe to say that going solar is more affordable than even before. That trend goes a long way to explaining why solar, while still making up less than 1 percent of the total US energy mix, is the fastest-growing power source in the country.
But access to solar power is still overwhelmingly skewed toward affluent households. Of the roughly 645,000 homes and business with rooftop solar panels in the US, less than 5 percent are households earning less than $40,000, according to a report earlier this year from the George Washington University Solar Institute. The typical solar home is 34 percent larger than the typical non-solar home, according to energy software provider Opower.
President Barack Obama wants to change that. On Monday the White House announced a package of initiatives to make solar more accessible for low-income households. The plans include a new solar target for federally subsidized housing and an effort to increase the availability of federally insured loans for solar systems.
Low-income households face a number of barriers to going solar. They’re less likely to own their own roof, less able to access loans or other financing options for solar, and more likely to have subsidized utility bills that don’t transfer the financial benefits of solar to the homeowner. And yet, in many ways low-income households stand to benefit the most from producing their own energy: The proportion of their income spent on energy is about four times greater than the national median, according to federal statistics. And because lower-income households tend to use less electricity overall than higher-income households, a typical solar setup covers more of their demand. The GW study found that a 4 kilowatt solar system, about the average size for a house, would cover more than half of a typical low-income household’s energy needs and that if all low-income households went solar, they would collectively save up to $23.3 billion each year.
“This is aimed at taking directly on those challenges and making it easier and straightforward to deploy low-cost solar energy in every community in the country,” senior White House climate advisor Brian Deese told reporters in a call yesterday.
The initiative starts by tripling the target for solar on federally subsidized housing to 300 megawatts by 2020, as well as directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide technical guidance for state and local housing authorities on how to go solar. The White House also announced more than $520 million in commitments from private companies, investors, NGOs, and state and local governments to pay for energy efficiency and solar projects for low-income households. The initiative places particular emphasis on so-called “community” solar, in which groups of households pool resources to build and maintain a shared solar system in their neighborhood.
Some states and power companies are already angling to support solar for low-income housing. Arizona Public Service, a Phoenix-area utility, recently launched a $28.5 million program to install its own solar panels on rooftops in its service area, specifically targeting low-income households. And New York’s electricity regulators recently bolstered incentives for power companies that invest in energy efficiency and renewables. Con Ed, the power company serving most of New York City, plans to spend $250 million on such upgrades in Brooklyn and Queens, as an alternative to a $1 billion upgrade to the old natural gas-fired electric grid.
The president’s plan builds on a commitment he announced earlier this year to train 75,000 workers for the solar industry (which is already adding jobs 10 times faster than the overall economy). It also dovetails neatly with Obama’s larger climate objectives, especially his hotly-contested plan to reduce the nation’s energy-related carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030, as well as the economy-wide climate targets that form the US bargaining chip for this year’s UN climate negotiations in Paris.
For all those promises to work, “the question is how states and utilities can reduce their emissions, and the buildings that they serve are a critical part of that system,” said Natural Resources Defense Council financial policy analyst Philip Henderson. “Making those buildings more efficient and using less energy from dirty power plants is a direct and essential way to meet those goals.”
Source:
Solar Power Is Mostly for the Affluent. Here’s Obama’s Plan to Spread the Wealth Around.
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
As your neighbors fire up their barbecues this Independence Day, the most popular day in America to grill, they won’t just send the scent of tri-tip or grilled corn over the fence in your direction—they’ll also send smoke. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote about here, even the “cleanest” gas grills emit pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every hour they’re used. So how many emissions can we expect from dinner barbecues on the 4th?
Roughly eighty percent of American households own barbecues or smokers, according to the Hearth, Patio, and Barbecue Association. Let’s say all 92.5 million of them decide to grill on Saturday. A 2013 study by HPBA found that 61 percent of users opted for gas grills, 42 percent for charcoal, and 10 percent for electric (some respondents had multiple grills). If that reflected all households across the United States, and each household used its grill for an hour on the 4th of July, then we’d get a calculation like this:
(56.425M gas grills*5.6 pounds of CO2) + (38.85M charcoal grills*11 pounds CO2) + (9.25M electric grills*15 pounds CO2 ) = 882 million pounds of CO2
That’s roughly as many emissions as burning 2145 railcars of coal, or running one coal-fired power plant for a month.
But let’s be honest—no one wants to give up summer grilling, and these emissions stats probably won’t convince your neighbor to turn off the barbecue. You might instead offer up ideas on recipes with ingredients that are friendlier to the planet—like these 4 veggie burgers that don’t suck.
Source:
America’s BBQ Grills Create as Much Carbon as a Big Coal Plant
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Have you ever wondered what a $500 pill looks like? Well, here’s your answer: it looks like pretty much any other pill.
Anyway, I’m supposed to take this for 21 days, then a week off, then another 21 days, etc. This will last a few months before we know if it’s working. If it does work, then I’ll be taking it forever (I think). So that’s $126,000 per year to keep Kevin alive. Of course, I pay only a fraction of that thanks to having excellent health insurance, and I’m sure that even Kaiser pays nowhere near that list price. Maybe half that, or a third. Still, pretty expensive!
Luckily I’m not on Obamacare. From what I hear, my case would have gone straight to a death panel, which almost certainly would have decided that my societal worth didn’t measure up to the cost of the treatment. And who could argue? I mean, blogging? Seriously?
POSTSCRIPT: I forgot to mention something in my previous health update: I feel great. Not 100 percent, mind you, but pretty good. My stomach is in fine fettle (in fact, I’m overeating these days), I’m sleeping well, and my energy level has recovered almost to normal. The long-term prognosis for the multiple myeloma is obviously still uncertain, and that’s an unhappy thing, but in the meantime at least I feel good for the first time in eight months!
Original article:
Libros
