Free Republic

City-parish president candidates Joel Robideaux and Dee Stanley navigated questions on coal-generated power, the disruption an elevated interstate might cause in Lafayette and whether the city has too many traffic signals — all posed at a Thursday evening forum sponsored by the local chapter of the Sierra Club. In a campaign season where the candidates have often found themselves repeatedly addressing the same issues in the string of debates and forums leading up to the Oct. 24 election, Stanley and Robideaux covered some new ground at the environmental group’s forum at the Lafayette Public Library downtown. Robideaux, a longtime state...

Texas State Senator Bob Hall, a former USAF Colonel and himself an EMP expert, characterizes as "equivalent to treason" the behavior of the electric utilities and their lobbyists: "As a Texas State Senator who tried in the 2015 legislative session to get a bill passed to harden the Texas grid against an EMP attack or nature's GMD, I learned first hand the strong control the electric power company lobby has on elected officials. We did manage to get a weak bill passed in the Senate but the power companies had it killed in the House. A very deceitful document which...

The EPA may be making some major changes to its carbon dioxide emissions regulatory scheme, the details of which have been leaked to the media just days ahead of its expected release date. The EPA will be getting rid of its energy efficiency building block of its Clean Power Plan over legal concerns the agency was overstepping its bounds by controlling how efficiently people used their electricity, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reported the Clean Power Plan will encourage nuclear power production. An EPA spokeswoman would not confirm the reported changes to the rule as it has...

Wait before turning on the sprinklers Heavy downpours across Southern California this weekend may help some make their water bill a little lighter this month. San Diego resident Shelley Stapley said the weekend rain was great for the soil in her tomato garden. "It is saturated; the soil is wet," said Stapley. She usually waters her plants by hand but now she's waiting a while before watering again. "Less water, less money for the bill because water is really expensive," said Stapley. California drought regulations ban watering for 48 hours after a rain, but Mark Mahady with Walter Andersen Nursery...

This Jaw-Dropping Slide Shows Why Saudi Arabia Makes So Much Money on Oil Schlumberger Limited points out just how much harder it is for U.S. oil companies to keep up with Saudi Arabia. A lot of reasons have been given as to why Saudi Arabia is allowing the oil price to not only fall but remain weak. Some suggest it's because it's seeking to harm emerging rivals like the U.S. and Russia. Others have suggested that the move is because it wants to keep its regional rival Iran at bay. While both could be true, the reason Saudi Arabia isn't...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new mercury pollution regulations that took effect last month opened the flood gates for a new multi-billion-dollar energy industry that has investors scrambling to get in on second-generation technology poised for massive revenue gains. When the EPA measures to curb mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants over 25 megawatts took effect on 16 April, it wasn’t only environmentalists who were popping the champagne corks—technology companies specializing in mercury remediation broke out the glasses as well. After all, the new regulations created a $2 billion-a-year, federally mandated business for them virtually overnight. These Federal regulations add...

The West Coast port slowdowns are hurting workers as well as retailers this holiday season.The NBC affiliate in Seattle reported that many of those who work for the ports can’t afford utilities or Christmas gifts for their families because the slowdowns have delayed their paychecks. The work slowdowns are the result of a seven-month labor dispute between the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Each side of the dispute blames the other.Vicki Raiter, the mother of one of the Port of Tacoma workers, told the local NBC affiliate, “If the shipments aren’t coming, then...

The New York Times ran an interesting article a few days ago discussing the skyrocketing electricity prices residents of New England are being forced to pay even before the winter season begins. The article identifies a resident of New Hampshire named John York who paid $376 to power his small printing business this past October. With no change in the amount of his work or his thermostat, his electricity bill climbed to $788 in November – an increase of 110 percent in just one month. What the article reveals (perhaps unintentionally) are the likely consequences of heavy handed government policies...

Ever since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its Clean Power Plan proposal this past June, a number of analyses have been conducted to try and determine the total cost of the regulation to electricity consumers. A report released this morning by Energy Ventures Analysis (EVA), however, goes a step further. In addition to the Clean Power Plan, EPA has recently finalized, proposed, or will soon propose a slew of environmental regulations affecting the electric power sector. These include new National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and particulate matter, the Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) to...

If you ask the people who run America's electric utilities what keeps them up at night, a surprising number will say solar power. Specifically, rooftop solar. That seems bizarre at first. Solar power provides just 0.4 percent of electricity in the United States — a minuscule amount. Why would anyone care? But utilities see things differently. As solar technology gets dramatically cheaper, tens of thousands of Americans are putting photovoltaic panels up on their roofs, generating their own power. At the same time, 43 states and Washington DC have "net metering" laws that allow solar-powered households to sell their excess...

To understand why revitalizing Detroit will be difficult, consider the response to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s (DWSD) recent plan to make overdue customers pay their bills. The DWSD serves more than 4 million customers across the Detroit region. The suburbs mostly buy water from the DWSD wholesale, so it’s mainly city residents and businesses who get billed directly, and over half of them—about 90,000 customers—haven’t paid up. Total past-due bills add up to nearly $90 million, with the average delinquent residential customer owing $540, or more than 7 months’ worth of service, based on an average bill of...

Unfortunately, competition is under attack in my beloved Wisconsin when it comes to energy choice. For the state where I grew up watching my father decry and fight like hell against the ruinous policies of Robert LaFollette Jr., who turned the state into a progressive “paradise” of which only Karl Marx and Gus Hall could be proud, I want nothing more than a vibrant competitive market. While Gov. Scott Walker has done more than any other Wisconsin governor in recent memory to undo policies that threaten competition, he’s missing the boat on energy choice in the state.

Why spend so much time commenting on Detroit? Because the city of more than 700,000 people is bankrupt, turning the water off on over one hundred thousand water customers, and now axing the contracts of nonprofit human service groups that have been providing safety net services for Detroit’s legions of poor people residing in devastated neighborhoods. Is there any hope? Inell Byrd, a 41-year-old home health aide still living in Detroit’s North End, told New York Times writer James Eligon, “I know the city is coming back.” That was the concluding sentence of Eligon’s moving portrait of residents of the...

Watch out, Detroit. Here comes the United Nations. WND has learned that after issuing a statement last week condemning Detroit’s decision to send water shut-off notices to tens of thousands of customers behind in their payments, the U.N now plans to conduct confidential policy discussions with the Obama administration to be followed by a formal public report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. On Monday, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s office in Geneva confirmed to WND that the U.N. plans to intervene directly in the Detroit water crisis, determined to apply international law to judge the U.S. in violation of...

In the early days of the Obama administration, “smart power” was all the rage—and not just on the foreign policy scene. In April 2009, National Public Radio reported how one Allentown, Pennsylvania, mother was saving more than a hundred dollars each month on her electric bill. Tammy Yeakel’s power company, PPL Energy, had helpfully installed a “smart meter” on her home that could monitor her power usage in real time. The meter uploaded that information to PPL’s website, so she could identify peak usage times during the day

After a blistering four-month rally that took stocks to record highs last year, January could not have been more different, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell more than 5%. In the first month of the year, traders worried the financial health of both the U.S. and smaller nations meant stocks were too dangerous to continue owning for the time being, especially after a nearly uninterrupted rise that began in early 2009. Those jitters continued on the first trading day in February, driven by weakness in a manufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management. By the close of...

Utility crews from Maine to Michigan and into Canada worked Wednesday to restore power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses left in the dark by last weekend's ice storm, and people slowly trickled out of shelters to spend Christmas Day at their finally warm homes. But not everyone was so lucky, including Ashley Walter, who was forced to spend Christmas at a shelter in a school in Litchfield with her husband, Jacob Walter, and their month-old daughter, Leah. The family lost power on Saturday, got it back and then lost it again Sunday. Ashley Walter and Leah stay...

Florida Power & Light and its sister company, NextEra Energy Resources, will eliminate 1,000 positions or 6.7 percent of their combined, nationwide workforce during the next two years, as part of an effort to improve efficiency and enhance the use of technology, the utility said Wednesday. A total of about 160 workers are expected to lose their jobs, with the remaining 840 cuts coming from the elimination of open positions, early retirement and normal attrition, said FPL President Eric Silagy. It is not yet known how many of the total job losses will be in Florida, but 60 of 80...

Prepare For The Coming Cyber Wars: US Government To Launch Pre-Emptive Cyber Strikes Robert Richardson February 5th, 2013 Off Grid Survival For years we have warned our readers about the dangers that a full scale cyber-attack could have on our infrastructure; now those dangers are even higher as the Federal Government prepares to launch Pre-emptive cyber strikes against rogue nations. According to the New York Times, President Barack Obama has just concluded a secret legal review of the administration’s new cyber war guidelines. The guidelines give President Obama the power to order pre-emptive cyber strikes to protect national security interests....

WASHINGTON – The United States now is facing two serious national security challenges, but they aren’t expected to be addressed effectively because of the serious budgetary headaches Congress has created, and a virtually deadlocked legislature on just about every issue pending, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. And the White House apparently isn’t paying attention. The first is the growing concern of the impact that an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, event – either natural or manmade – could have on the national grid system, on which the Department of Defense has a 99 percent dependency. The other concern...