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em>"Probably for the next decade, the most dominate technology around the world will be coal..." -Jeff Immelt The fastest growing source of energy in the world last year was coal, and it is going to stay that way for a very long time. With that in mind, one has to wonder why President Obama has insisted on the gut-wrenching destruction of the coal industry that has costs thousands of jobs, and has sent electricity costs to all-time highs. This, combined with last month's report from the International Energy Agency, state that reaching the goal of carbon emission reduction would cost...

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It's California’s latest spending rush--and this time it involves carbon. For years, the Wall Street Journal has been reporting that cap and trade's real purpose was to create another revenue stream for politicians while dodging accountability for raising taxes. Now Senate President Darrel Steinberg is suggesting that cap and trade revenues be used to finance the state’s $68 billion "bullet" train. One problem: The cap-and-trade revenues must be used to reduce carbon emissions. According to one analyst, the train's construction will do just the opposite; it will increase emissions. An initiative that was once intended to reach green programs (e.g....

We have to first assume that global warming, or climate change, or whatever it's called this week, is caused by us. That is a big assumption, one that Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama embraces. Plus, as reinforcement, we have this Fact Sheet from Obama about methane gas as a contributor to global warming, I mean climate change, uh, I mean ... : ... last June, President Obama issued a broad-based Climate Action Plan, announcing a series of executive actions to reduce carbon pollution, prepare the U.S. for the impacts of climate change, and lead international efforts to address global climate...

OSLO (Reuters) - A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China's greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century, a draft U.N. report shows. Using the technology, power plants would burn biomass - wood, wood pellets, or plant waste like from sugar cane - to generate electricity while the carbon dioxide in the biomass is extracted, piped away and buried deep underground. Among techniques, a chemical process can strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases from combustion. The process - called bio-energy...

Flows of money towards climate adaptation projects are becoming increasingly unpredictable, making it difficult for vulnerable countries to prepare for the hardships caused by global warming. Future fundraising tactics would have to be “extremely aggressive” in order to raise enough money to continue their work, according to board members of the UN-run Adaptation Fund, the primary finance provider for adaptation projects around the world. “We are essentially going with our hands out to everyone,” Philip Weech, the board member from the Bahamas representing the Latin American and Caribbean regions, told RTCC. “We take funds from anyone, any inch, but the...

.................Premier Li Keqiang last week declared war on pollution, which is expected to speed up the process of turning China's limited environmental levy into a full-blown tax targeting the nation's major polluters. But the all-out efforts to combat China's disastrous pollution levels might get in the way of plans to tax carbon dioxide emissions in a bid to stunt the rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions, Zhu Guangyao, the vice environment minister, said...... A carbon tax is increasingly controversial among lawmakers, said Zhu, adding that an environment tax would be easier to push through without carbon in the mix. The...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rule to limit carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants is tainted by secretiveness and collusion with environmental groups, according to a conservative environmental lawyer. Energy and Environmental Law Institute attorney Chris Horner has presented an 81-page regulatory comment showing the EPA’s “New Source Performance Standard” (NSPS) — which limits carbon emissions from new coal plants — was developed by officials masking their true agendas, using secret and private email accounts and in collusion with environmental groups.

President Obama speaking at a Safeway distribution center in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, while speaking about fuel standards: "So for decades, the fuel efficiency standards of our cars and trucks was stuck in neutral even as other kinds of technology leapt forward," Obama said. "And that left families and businesses and our economy vulnerable to fluctuations in oil prices. Every time oil prices shot up the economy got hurt. Our automakers were in danger of being left in the dust by foreign automakers. Carbon pollution was going unchecked, which was having severe impacts on our weather."

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Roger Bezdek. The Environmental Protection Agency, other government agencies and various scientists contend that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming and climate change. They use this claim to justify repressive regulations for automobiles, coal-fired power plants and other facilities powered by hydrocarbon energy. Because these rules are costing millions of jobs and billions of dollars, a federal Interagency Working Group (IWG) devised the “social cost of carbon” concept – which attaches arbitrary monetary values to the alleged impacts of using hydrocarbons and emitting carbon dioxide. SCC estimates...

Video at link. Stymied by the GOP's long resistance to cap and trade legislation, the EPA this week began public hearings -- the next step toward a final rule -- to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new coal plants. The rule would limit emissions to 1100 pounds per Megawatt hour, a level the coal industry says is technologically unattainable. Green energy proponents disagree. "Opponents say this will prevent ever building another coal-fired plant in the United States today. They say that the technology is not commercially available. These claims are scare tactics," Rep. HenryWaxman, D-Calif., said in a press conference...

Binding national targets on renewable energy are expected to be dropped from new EU proposals due to be unveiled on Wednesday. The UK has lobbied hard to have the mandatory 2030 target watered down, saying it would drive up energy bills. The EU executive will also outline a goal on emissions cuts for 2030, set to be 35 or 40% below 1990 levels. But green groups said the proposals lacked ambition and were the acts of a "burnt out" Commission. Seven years ago, the EU set out a three-pronged energy and climate strategy for 2020. Emissions of greenhouse gases were...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – The developers of what could become the nation’s largest wind energy project say the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has overestimated how many eagles could be killed by wind turbines at the site. They say they’re planning a variety of measures to reduce eagle deaths at the $5 billion Chokecherry/Sierra Madre wind power project south of Rawlins, and those steps will result in fewer deaths than the BLM estimate of 46-64 per year.

WASHINGTON—Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu is joining the board of directors of a Canadian company that says it has a cost-effective way to capture and reuse carbon dioxide from power plants fired by coal and natural gas. Vancouver-based Inventys Thermal Technologies says it has developed a process that it says uses less energy than conventional carbon capture techniques and is less expensive. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Chu served as energy secretary in President Barack Obama's first term and now teaches physics at Stanford University. "It's a cause I believe in, and it is also something that has a shot at...

Happy holidays from the Obama administration. Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency’s authority to bodies of water on private property. On Tuesday, the White House released its regulatory agenda for the fall of 2013. It lists hundreds of pending energy and environmental regulations being crafting by executive branch agencies, including 134 regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency alone. The EPA is currently crafting 134 major and minor regulations, according to the White House’s regulatory agenda. Seventy-six of the EPA’s pending...

**SNIP** “What specific things are you doing in life to lower your personal carbon footprint? And what is the biggest one specific thing I as an individual can do to reduce mine?” Gore responded by saying, “I use only carbon-free electricity. Have 33 solar panels on my roof, seven deep geothermal wells under my driveway, LED lights and highest-grade energy-saving windows, max insulation, hybrid plug-in car, etc. No fountains, btw. What you can do? Make smart choices for low-carbon options in the marketplace, make sure you divest from carbon-intensive stocks; be a smart and active citizen! Let politicians know the...

“ISON’s green color comes from the gases surrounding its icy nucleus,” says SpaceWeather.com’s Tony Phillips. “Jets spewing from the comet’s core probably contain cyanogen (CN: a poisonous gas found in many comets) and diatomic carbon (C2). Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight in the near-vacuum of space.” Both are normally colorless gases that fluoresce a green color when excited by energetic ultraviolet light in sunlight. And if those poisonous gasses sound dangerous, don’t worry. They are spread out in space much too thinly to touch us here on Earth. So don’t fall prey to fear mongers who are...

A major project has been quietly underway, within the executive branch of the U.S. government, trying to calculate a "social cost of carbon" (SCC) -- a so-called "non-market externality" (i. e., not captured by the normal price system of a free market). This calculated cost would then be imposed on all government programs in order to "fix" the price system -- so they say. The SCC report was published in May 2013, with little fanfare; public comments had to be submitted by Sept. 16. But this whole misconceived exercise has no valid scientific basis and can destroy the supply of...

The outgoing government in Norway has buried much-vaunted plans to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground amid mounting costs and delays. The oil and energy ministry said the development of full-scale carbon dioxide capture at Mongstad oil refinery had been discontinued. It said it remained committed to research into carbon capture. When the Labour Party presented the plan in 2007, it was hailed as Norway's equivalent of a "Moon landing". Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his allies lost a general election to conservatives and centrists this month, and are due to step down shortly. Mongstad had already run into...