The European Commission recently published a European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan). It identifies the six most important technologies required to meet climate-change and energy-supply goals, providing detailed road maps with specific targets for the year 2020 and more general outlines for 2050. Importantly, it also links to their regulatory plan and positions at the upcoming major climate-change conference. A couple of quotes from Commission’s Communication, which accompanied the report, are insightful. ”Markets and energy companies acting on their own are unlikely to be able to deliver the needed technological breakthroughs within a sufficiently short time span to meet the EU’s energy and climate policy goals.” That is, you can’t depend on markets alone when time is important. Locked-in investments and vested interests lead to slow change. Also, “[the plan] sets our vision of a Europe with world leadership in a diverse portfolio of clean, efficient and low-carbon energy technologies.” The EU positions the investments as an opportunity, not a burden. Continue Reading »

On 28 September 2009 Norfolk Southern introduced their new all-electric switcher engine, dubbed the NS 999, and it’s getting a lot of press. This engine, which is a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Energy, the Federal Railroad Administration, and Penn State University, could be the future of rail freight. However, in most of the articles available there is nothing mentioned of how this new engine differs from prior ones. We need to take a look at what this engine does and what it means before we can get excited about seeing it cruising down the track.

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Another new source of energy is making the news: natural gas from shale rock formations. NPR’s Morning Edition recently lauded shale gas as a relatively clean, abundant, domestic source of energy. What it failed to mention were the environmental impacts of extracting natural gas from shale. Continue Reading »

Ever since Elizabeth and I returned from our oral history with Theo Colborn, the topic of hydraulic fracturing (better known as “fracking” or “fracing”) for deep-well mining of natural gas keeps emerging. Colorado has a large number of these operations across the state, as do a handful of other Western states. Closer to home, mining companies are positioning themselves to gain access to the natural-gas resources available in the Marcellus Shale, which covers a fair portion of Pennsylvania. From the air an established mining site looks amazingly minimal, which masks the efforts required to get at the natural-gas deposits or to process the gas. The size and scale of the operations notwithstanding, opponents of drilling have focused on two related issues. First, these operations require substantial amounts of water, which is used to create pressure in order to fracture the rock formations surrounding the gas deposits. The second issue involves the other chemicals in the water solutions used in the fracking process. While the exact composition of these mixtures is not publicly available, it’s generally known that it comprises a fairly toxic mixture of heavy metals, solvents, and additional organic chemicals. Continue Reading »

In my 7 July 2009 blog entry I made the point that cap-and-trade legislation had lost its way during the law-making process and its effectiveness was being diluted. In his New York Times column of Sunday, 9 August, Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw makes the same point. From an economist’s point of view the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions is a carbon tax. Such a tax would act to align private incentives with social costs and benefits. Revenue from the tax could be used to reduce other taxes and thus keep the total tax load neutral. A cap-and-trade system could achieve the same result if the permits were auctioned off to the emitters. Continue Reading »

In the Washington Post on Tuesday, I argued that the Cash for Clunkers program—like other stimulus programs that encourage consumers to trade in their appliances for more efficient models—did not account for the environmental costs associated with manufacturing and disposing of old cars and other durable goods. Since then I have been asked, quite rightly, if I can quantify those costs. I cannot. But the answer is evidence of the problem. Continue Reading »