Free Republic

The President of American Electric Power says cap and trade will eventually drive up the price of electricity, but Mike Morris says it's a necessary step for the United States and countries around the world when it comes to dealing with climate change. "We think that it's probably the best way to go about addressing the issue of global warming and I underline the phrase 'global warming' because, at the end of the day, that's the challenge," Morris said on Wednesday's MetroNews Talkline. The U.S. House of Representatives has already approved the massive climate change bill that is now being...

Residential customers aren't the only ones stung by a string of electricity rate increases. A year ago the steel mill faced a problem businesses love -- its Roanoke plant scrambled to match production with red-hot demand. "We were going great guns right through September of last year," said Joe Crawford, vice president and general manager of Steel Dynamics Roanoke Bar Division, formerly known as Roanoke Electric Steel. "And then October hit." The minimill melts scrap metal in electric-arc furnaces and thus depends heavily on electricity. For months now, it has operated at about 50 percent capacity and tried to cut...

The price of coal and efforts to control its emissions keep energy costs spiraling higher. American Electric Power, parent of Appalachian Power Co., reports that it is "the largest purchaser of coal in the Western Hemisphere." For Appalachian, coal-fired power plants generate about 98 percent of the electricity it delivers to customers in a territory that includes portions of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee. For AEP companywide, coal fuels about 70 percent of power generation. And all that coal, an increasingly controversial fuel, helps explain the upward spiral of Appalachian's costs for complying with environmental regulations. Appalachian and AEP report...

Al Gore’s campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore’s followers realized how much their man stands to gain? Earlier this year Gore experienced a notable public relations debacle. The Tennessee Center for...

IMAGINE if the nation's transportation infrastructure had been designed to serve only small regions, with wheat from Iowa easily reaching bakeries in Des Moines but not New York or computer products from the Silicon Valley easily reaching stores in Los Angeles but not Chicago. Costs of goods would vary widely among regions, and the economy would suffer.  Welcome to the world of electricity, where separate transmission systems - the "transportation" infrastructure of electricity - built by local utilities for local customers now serve as a national network.While not a "third-world transmission system," as some said after the huge East Coast...

The United States faces a severe credit crunch as mounting losses on risky forms of debt catch up with the banks and force them to curb lending and call in existing loans, according to a report by Lombard Street Research. Bear Stearns headquarters: Banks 'set to call in a swathe of loans' Bear Stearns headquarters in New York The group said the fast-moving crisis at two Bear Stearns hedge funds had exposed the underlying rot in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and the vast nexus of collateralised debt obligations known as CDOs. "Excess liquidity in the global system will be...

If you have funds across the Channel, or a ferme in Acquitaine, be vigilant. Keep a close eye on Europe's press, because you might one day find your money is nailed more immovably to its Continental home than you had thought. Four years ago, a small "cellule" inside the European Commission was ordered to draft a report, instigated by Paris, examining the legal basis under EU treaty law for 1970s-style exchange controls. It concluded that Brussels may lawfully freeze capital flows in and out of the EU, and within it, and that this could be done by a "qualified...

The dollar tumbled to a near a 15-year low against sterling yesterday on fresh signs of economic trouble in the United States. An 8.3pc crash in US industrial orders and an admission by the Federal Reserve chairman that Washington does not know how bad housing really is set off another day of wild gyrations on the currency markets. US house prices fell 3.5pc to an average $221,000, the third month of declines. Stocks of unsold homes rose to 7.4 months' supply, the highest since 1993. The US consumer confidence index fell sharply to 102.9. The "truckers index" of tonnage shipped...

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR The real story behindthe Clinton body count Posted: July 13, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: The following is an eye-opening look into New York Times best-selling author Richard Poe's revealing book, "Hillary's Secret War." Whereas Edward Klein's book on the New York senator reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal life, Poe's expose focuses on how Hillary Clinton and the left's "shadow government" have labored to put her and her far-left agenda in the White House by controlling the still-uncensored flow of real news to Americans – via the Internet.If that sounds too fantastic to be...

CHICAGO, Dec 21 (Reuters) - A rare and sometimes deadly pneumonia has hit 18 U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq, and Army medical investigators are at a loss to explain the cause, according to a study published on Tuesday. In a report appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center said two of the soldiers had died from the rare illness, called acute eosinophilic pneumonia, or AEP. No common source was found for the outbreak that occurred between March 2003 and March 2004 among the soldiers in Iraq. The study covered only...

...The Kyoto idea is 10 years old now, and no better for its age. The U.S. wisely chose to forgo the pact, as the long- term costs add up to hundreds of billions a year across the world economy, not to mention untold lost economic opportunities. The energy industry has heretofore backed this U.S. decision, noting that even Kyoto's defenders have admitted the pact wouldn't slow climate change.... What's changed the industry's tune at the broadest level may be the Bush Administration's Clear Skies program, a smart pollution-reduction proposal that may pass Congress next year. That program, about to be...

WASHINGTON, April 18 — A nuclear reactor in Texas is leaking cooling water from the bottom of its giant reactor vessel, a development that experts view with concern because they have never seen it before, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today. Technicians at the South Texas Nuclear Project, about 90 miles southwest of Houston, have found residues indicating that cooling water leaked from the vessel through two penetrations where instruments are inserted into the core, according to the company that operates the plant. Operators at all 103 commercial nuclear reactors have been giving closer attention to their reactor vessels since...