Free Republic

Venezuela whose government under President Hugo Chávez subsidizes gasoline for their citizens, pay in the neighborhood of 18 cents a gallon, and much of this gasoline comes from the US in the form of exports. For example, U.S. exports of gasoline to Venezuela climbed to a record high of 85,000 barrels a day in November of 2012, and total petroleum products are well over 200,000 barrels per day of refined products being imported from US refinery operators. Consumers Need Voice in Washington I guess it is too bad consumers don`t have a large advocate group in Washington looking out for...

2011 could bring some quick indications on whether this year's collapse of energy and climate legislation in the Senate created lasting wounds.

 Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) chatted Wednesday about reviving their partnership on energy, Lieberman told E2. “It is one of the things we want to work on together next year, start again,” Lieberman said Wednesday in the Capitol. His comments come as President Obama in the new year will seek talks with Republicans on energy. Lieberman said areas on the table include a “clean-energy standard” for utilities, which Graham is already pushing, and efforts to...

Imagine: It’s Friday evening, and the sun is down. You are rolling home in your environmentally responsible EV after an honest day’s work, emitting exactly zero greenhouse gases. You give a wave to your likewise electrified neighbor who’s bringing home the bacon to wife and family. You put the car in the garage and hook it up to the charger that nice electrician had installed. You shout “daddy’s home!” Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. A huge fireball shoots into the sky as the transformer on the pole out on the street explodes. Down at the corner, another explosion. A block...

BUCHANAN, N.Y. — For a striped bass in the Hudson River, a clutch of trout eggs in Lake Michigan or a salmon in San Francisco Bay, drifting a little too close to a power plant spells death. Sucked in with enormous volumes of water, battered against the sides of pipes and heated by steam, the small fry of the aquatic world are being sacrificed to the cooling systems of power plants around the country. Environmentalists say the killing is needless, but energy-industry officials say opponents of nuclear power exaggerate the losses. The issue is being debated at an Indian Point...

With two neighboring states having recently approved massive offshore wind farm projects, the Corzine administration is considering expanding New Jersey's future reliance on wind power as a clean source of energy. The state's draft energy master plan currently calls for developing 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2020 -- enough to power nearly 1 million homes -- but that target is expected to double and possibly even triple when the administration finalizes the plan later this month, according to three people who have been briefed on the administration's thinking. A spokesman for the Corzine administration declined to comment. Wind...

ST. PAUL, Minn. - The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan's lab at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research. Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source. Some varieties of algae are as much as 50 percent oil, and that oil can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is slashing the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is...

New Jersey's lawmakers are poised to impose new pollution penalties on power companies -- the first step in determining who pays for contributing to global warming and who profits from preventing it. By year's end, the Legislature is expected to approve a plan requiring the companies to pay for the greenhouse gases they produce, a charge that could amount to $70 million or more each year. The system is designed to give companies an incentive to cut emissions. But in the short run, at least, the price of polluting is likely to be passed on to consumers. And that could...

The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies. This threatens to leave us prostrate. It must change—and the good news is that it can change, quickly. Using portions of the hundreds of billions of petrodollars they are annually draining from our economy, Middle Easterners have established training centers for terrorists, paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers, and funded the purchase of weapons and explosives. Oil revenues underwrite new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the United States and the West. They pay for more than 10,000 radical madrassahs set up around...