The more things change...

...the more they stay the same. In the year since I started this blog, we've witnessed many substantial changes, events, and progressions on the energy/climate frontier. And yet, on the whole, it seems American policy hasn't evolved much at all. Three examples illustrate this frustrating truth*.

• As you may have heard, this week is the one-year anniversary of the blowout at the BP's Macando well in the Gulf of Mexico. Described (accurately) as the worst environmental disaster in American history, the months-long fiasco spilled tens of millions of gallons, endangered local enterprise, public health, and demonstrated the terrifying and disproportionate disaster potential of our fossil fuel addiction. However, a year later, and Congress has yet to react to the Gulf catastrophe with any kind of legislation. Not only did we fail to come close to passing a cap-and-trade bill, but we couldn't even pass policy changes increasing the liability of oil companies in damages caused by accidents from $75 million to a more reasonable figure or widening the purview of regulators to oversee offshore oil drilling. For perhaps the most-reported non-nuclear energy accident in history, its legacy in American policy will apparently be shockingly empty.

• Last April, energy and environmental advocates cheered the Interior Department's approval of Cape Wind, the nation's first offshore wind farm. The victory came after a decade-long battle (the project was first proposed in 2001) against NIMBYism and obstructionist tactics to block construction. This past week, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement approved the project's construction plans. While technically good news, the Cape Wind saga demonstrates the unacceptable time frames with which we measure success in the Energy Quest, and as Alexis Madrigal pointed out, it is unclear how we will overcome these infrastructural challenges.
  

• Finally, we return to cap-and-trade. As I mentioned, last summer witnessed the upsetting (but not super surprising) failure of the American Power Act, which was originally Senators Kerry and Lieberman's cap-and-trade legislation. Californians, on the other hand, celebrated the defeat of Proposition 23 in November, whose backers sought to block AB 32, the state's own cap-and-trade policy ... until a coalition of environmental groups, the Association of Irritated Residents, blocked AB 32 in court. Keep in mind that these environmental groups were instrumental in campaigning against Prop 23, and proceeded with an about-face to reject the environmental policy on the grounds that it would concentrate non-uniformly mixed pollutants like NOx and sulfur dioxides in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Dave Roberts explains why this probably isn't true. From a big picture perspective, this example illustrates the difficulty of advancing energy and climate policy, even in California, "America's laboratory."
  

These and other distressing stalls and defeats show plainly that standard operating procedure in American energy policy is not working quickly enough. Tackling the problems of our fossil fuel addiction, national recession, increasingly violent resource wars, and climate change will require a change in dynamics. The sooner we transition to a policy agenda based on technological innovation, workforce and STEM education, and cohesive infrastructural progress, the better.
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*Yes, I'm cherry-picking. Please, PLEASE give me examples of why I'm wrong!

Budget Roundup

While I will always think the President could bring more political gravitas to energy policy, at least there's some interesting energy dynamics in the budget proposal released yesterday.

• President Obama's 2012 budget proposal includes the elimination of $4 billion of subsidies and tax incentives for oil companies (via @NoahFisher at Americans for Energy Leadership).
• The Administration will also push for small modular nuclear reactors.
• Many scientists were relatively pleased with the budget proposal.
• Budget increases in DOE R&D and a rollback of subsidies for carbon energy amounts to $8 billion directed towards clean energy.
• Loan guarantees for nuclear power would triple under Obama's budget, something I recently advocated.
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu has a nifty presentation on science, research and innovation in the budget.

Oil and democracy

Nate Silver has some interesting thoughts on the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, noting that nations without large oil reserves (especially in the Middle East) tend more towards democracies than their neighboring petro-dictatorships.

Michael Ross, a political science professor at U.C.L.A. who is among the foremost proponents of the hypothesis, has concluded that democratic transitions are 50 percent more likely in oil-poor states than in oil rich ones. That fact alone is certainly not sufficient to explain why Tunisia has undergone regime change, or why Egypt is on the brink of it--but it does suggest that the underlying probabilities were greater in those countries than for some of their regional neighbors.

If the ramifications of this hypothesis are carried to fruition, perhaps we can expect increasing democratic activity even in petro-states like Saudi Arabia as reserves fall and oil revenues suffer. Talk about decentralized power...

Quote of the Day

A reminder from The Daily Show on the geostrategic strangeness of our energy pipeline.

So if we give them money for oil, that allows them to buy weapons from us with a little left over to fund terrorist groups that we must then send our military over to fight, which costs a lot of money and fuel (which we buy from them). It's like we're the commission-less middlemen in a war we're waging on ourselves.

UC Davis study suggests lots of work ahead to bring renewables to market

Cross-posted at WattHead - Energy News and Commentary.

A recent study from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at U.C. Davis builds a pricing model that relies on resource availability and market capitalization to determine that global supplies of oil are likely to run dry roughly 100 years before renewable technologies are capable of replacing them. The paper, from authors Nataliya Malyshkina and Deb Niemeier and published in Environmental Science and Technology, uses IEA estimates of petroleum estimates and cumulative financial data for major oil and alternative energy companies, including market capitalization, share number, share price, and net income per share. Unlike typical technological projections based on learning curves or Hotelling predictions, the study develops its own method for determining the path forward for resource availability based on three market-expectation-based steps:

1. Identify traded securities, whose future cash flows strongly depend on the appearance of a new technology of interest (e.g., a viable replacement of crude oil, or a technology for reducing CO₂ emissions).
2. Specify a model for pricing these securities.
3. Collect historical and current market data on the securities (e.g., share price, number of shares outstanding, dividends paid, etc.).

The model they created gives the value T ≈ 131, where T is the time horizon "until the appearance or adoption of new technologies related to important sustainability problems." With a base year of 2009, this predicts 2140 as the year we can economically expect renewables to become suitable replacements for traditional fossil energy. Malyshkina and Niemeier also rely on IEA estimates of peak oil, which suggest that the rate of global oil production will begin to decline in some distinct time between 2010 and 2030. Put it all together, and we get a world tapped out of oil a full century before replacement technologies can meet expected demand.

Specific observations on the market for clean technology are similarly stark. For instance, the paper makes the point that even the most successful clean tech companies fall short in their own market to fossil fuel giants with relatively minor budgets for renewables.

In a recent article analyzing when renewable energy companies might occupy significant market share, it was pointed out that Exxon Mobil's current market capitalization was 28 times that of First Solar and 26 times that of Vesta Wind Systems, both among the largest renewable companies. Even for major corporations like General Electric, with a large stake in wind power, stock prices are driven by other parts of the company.

All in all, the Davis paper combines econometric, financial, geophysical and policy-oriented data to create a compelling, if alarming, model for resource replacement. Their work confirms the narrative offered by a new report called "Post-Partisan Power", which makes the claim that "America will make little sustained progress in transforming the U.S. energy economy or fully capturing the economic opportunities in new clean energy export markets until alternatives to conventional fossil fuels become cheaper." These two reports, in addition to a growing consensus following the demise of cap-and-trade this summer, at least implicitly identify the large price gap between renewable technologies and fossil fuel resources as the single largest obstacle to a fully decarbonized economy.

The pricing model and theory proposed by Malyshkina and Niemeier employs the concept of path dependency--where we have been matters for where we are going. After over a century of development on our modern carbon infrastructure, the momentum of the global economy will not shift course towards more sustainable technology easily. However, the difficulty is not a reason not to pursue smart and aggressive policy, according to the authors.

If policy interventions such as new major investments in the alternative-energy sector are made, then we would expect that the alternative-energy companies market capitalization would increase, with the net effect that the estimated value of T would decrease.

The next step, of course, is identifying those policy interventions and employing them effectively.

Energy poverty

Currently watching: "Syriana" (2005).

Bryan Woodman: What are they thinking? They're thinking that it's running out. It's running out, and 90% of what's left is in the Middle East. Look at the progression: Versailles, Suez, 1973, Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2. This is a fight to the death. So what are they thinking? 'Great!' They're thinking 'keep playing, keep buying yourself new toys, keep spending $50,000 a night on your hotel room, but don't invest in your infrastructure, don't build a real economy.' So that when you finally wake up, they will have sucked you dry, and you will have squandered the greatest natural resource in history.

Much of the goings-on in this still-prescient film concern the poverty in the Middle East, which, the film implicitly claims, fosters religious zealotry, extremism and cultural animosity towards the West. This is just one very specific kind of energy poverty, the kind where the US spends $1 billion daily on Middle Eastern oil, and that money doesn't go to building governments and societies, but goes to the petro-dictators for their own consumption. While the West frets over future, and legitimate, dangers of rising sea levels and prolonged droughts due to global warming, citizens of these petro-dictatorships are already suffering the full list of symptoms of the global carbon addiction.

But that's not the only type of energy poverty. Teryn Norris, president of Americans for Energy Leadership, recently reported:

Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people -- over one third of global population -- meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. "Without access to modern, commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, social instability, and underdevelopment," concludes the International Energy Agency.

This type of unacceptable poverty exists in countries with and without the cursed luxury of global oil deposits. While rich countries in the West (and the East) can afford to pay a little more for cleaner energy, poor nations must resort to only the most primitive energy sources for their energy needs. This is a problem that will not be fixed solely by individual countries pricing carbon and deploying more clean energy infrastructure. There must also be a sustained global effort in buying down the cost of clean energy, so that it does not become another luxury of the rich world when we run out of oil.

The benefits of clean energy technology are numerous. It can foster economic development in poor nations and provide alternatives to dirty, inefficient biomass sources for heating and cooking. But not yet. The ability of cleantech to help lift billions of people out of poverty, and to put an end to the clout of petro-dictators, must be a part of the conversation

Playing with fire in an open range

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has some excellent analysis of, among other things, the BP oil spill:

Here's the real outrage: In the wake of the BP spill, essentially no laws have been changed -- not even a ridiculously low cap on damages private parties can collect from oil companies. Senate Republican leaders said Wednesday they wouldn't support a bill retroactively removing the liability cap; and not even Democrats Mary Landrieu (D-La) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska) will support it.

But more than providing a scathing recap of Congress's (read: the Senate's) utter incompetence and gridlock, Reich paints the BP fiasco in the broader portrait of corporate malfeasance:

Corporations aren't people. They have no brains, no consciousness, no capacity for intent or guilt. Every one of their moveable parts can be replaced, just like BP's former CEO Tony Hayward was replaced. Corporate accountability and corporate responsibility are meaningless concept. Corporations exist for only one purpose: to make money.

It would do well for us to remember this lesson. Without downplaying the tragedy of the Gulf oil spill, nor vindicating the irresponsible parties, we have to make sure that our response, you know, makes sense. The last 100 days of activism have been directed at a not-quite-strawman "BP," as though massive oil companies hatched a plan to poison the Gulf and destroy livelihoods. In the wake of outrage directed at BP, actual scumbags like Tony Hayward get let off the hook. Anyone celebrating his expulsion from BP is mostly fooling themselves, if you ask me. Immediate $900,000 pension and a reprieve from the scandal-ridden spotlight? Yes please.

No, the real cause of this disaster was not evil, nor was it really MMS, or Tony Hayward's or any other underlings at BP's fault. What's to blame is not a person, persons or "BP." Instead, we should be pointing our fingers at the system we've set up. Reich:

If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully-enforced and through penalties that are higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.

Reich parallels the BP story with that of the Citizens United Case and the recently defeated DISCLOSE Act. Our representatives are selling the system to lobbyists and corporate money, confusing the tasks of government with the tasks of contributors. The era of big government being over and all, we have come to accept that any regulation or limit on corporate activity stifles innovation and is generally the enemy of freedom. But what we've created instead are the biggest Principle Agent problems our society has recently encountered. Companies like BP and Goldman Sachs operate within the constraints of (fully enforced) laws to make a buck. The risks associated with their activities -- oil spills, derivatives exploding, etc -- can be mostly ignored in the costs of doing business, as we've seen with the Crash of 2008 and the Spill. The federal government (AKA, you and me) will pick up the tab. Teabaggers horrified at the bailouts probably don't realize the spill is the exact same problem: people playing with fire in an open range, and then walking away when it burns everything down.

Brad Plumer put it well in his column this week at The New Republic.

...but it's a little ironic to see that Republicans are basically proposing a socialized insurance system for oil companies, while Democrats want to leave them to the not-so-tender mercies of the free market. Funny how that works.

Brad has it spot on. With health care, Republicans (and plenty of Democrats) are vehemently against government footing the bill, but not so with oil companies. Why? Because that's the way the health insurance and oil companies want it. Without liability, and without regulation, corporations will do what they are designed to do: make money. BP is not in the interest of providing much-needed energy to society; they do so because there's good money in it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Until there is.

Or, we could just start the clean tech revolution already. After all, when's the last time you heard of a wind spill?

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• The New Republic reports on a new study showing that solar energy has become cheaper than nuclear - will the market it take it from here?
• Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma has signed into law the Energy Security Act, an RES of 15% by 2015.
• Tera-Gen Power just received $1.2 billion in financing to expand their Kern County wind farm to 3000MW, making it the biggest wind farm in the country.
• Here we go again - another oil leak is spewing oil 20 feet into the air in the Gulf.
• Chevy announced the pricing plans for its anticipated Volt: $41,000 before tax breaks, or $350/month lease.
• Daily Kos points out that BP hasn't put any of its $20 billion in Gulf reparations in escrow yet.
• Paul Krugman weighs in on the death of the climate bill, lending his considerable column to the blame game.
• Remember how bringing a comprehensive climate/energy bill to Copenhagen was supposed to show the world how serious the US is about fighting climate change? Well, after missing that deadline, Michael Levi at CFR discusses how the latest failure will affect US climate diplomacy.
• Here are some key recommendations from the report Powering America's Economy: Energy Innovation at the Crossroads of National Security Challenges.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Wednesday Edition

• Yesterday, Secretary Chu convened representatives from 24 countries forthe first Clean Energy Ministerial; here are 8 promises made at that confab.
• There's a study out there predicting that $200 billion in investment R&D money in solar could make the clean technology cost-competitive with coal. Well, China is forecast to spend $738 billion over the next ten years on clean technology.
• Google Energy yesterday purchased 114MW of wind power in Iowa.
• Van Jones rails against utilities trying to squeeze more sulfur and mercury out of their smokestacks under the potential new energy regulations established by APA.
• With per capita energy consumption still somewhere around 1/4 of that in the US, China has officially surpassed the States in overall energy consumption.
• Thought this was pretty cool - The Public Service Company of Oklahoma, a state utility, is offering ratepayers the opportunity to buy their energy from a wind farm.
• Peter Teague, in a must-read LA Times oped, adds his voice to the many calling for more investment in clean tech.
• Jim Woolsey, former CIA Director, spoke at Stanford recently connecting oil to terror and Islamic fanaticism.
• This is awesome.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: (/climategate) and, yes, more oil.

• Dave Roberts was on Rachel Maddow last night talking about the oil spill and the climate/energy bill.
• Prop 23, a.k.a. the Dirty Energy Proposition, isn't doing so hot in the opinion polls.
• As you've no doubt heard if you're reading my blog, the Solar Impulse, a plane powered entirely by retrofitted solar panels, finished its 26-hour flight yesterday...meaning it flew through the night.
• Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic asks: can the US innovate without manufacturing? Quick answer: NO. (Seriously though, read the whole piece.)
• Not that it really matters anymore (except maybe for the researchers themselves), but a British panel has cleared the East Anglia climatologists at the center of "climategate" of any wrongdoing.
• Michael Levi figures that a utility-only cap, while not raising nearly as much revenue as an economy-wide cap, would still reduce the deficit due to a correlatively diminished effect on business.
• Keep an eye on this: the EPA's new "transport rule" may place bureaucratic restrictions on cap-and-trade schemes for more than just CO2.
• Robert Cialdini, psychologist and author of the influential Influence, weighs in on energy conservation.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• Kate Sheppard summarizes the last few weeks and the Administration's sluggish response to the oil spill.
• Senator Lindsay Graham criticizes the climate bill he had a heavy hand in creating.
• A recent poll shows deteriorating public support for offshore oil drilling.
• According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Western states could get 35% of their power from solar and wind technology within seven years.
• Michael Giberson discusses the smart grid and the advance of civilization.
• Current Cost, the largest global supplier of realtime power meters, is now compatible with Google PowerMeter.
• Jonathan Hiskes asks: In wake of Gulf spill, should this be the summer of energy reform?
• California Gubernatorial Candidate and current Attorney General Jerry Brown is demanding that the federal government not dismantle PACE, a financing program to reduce electricity use.
• Mother Jones calculates how many offshore wind turbines we could buy for the cost of one Deepwater Rig.
• Paul Krugman talks about regulation and comments lightly on bureaucratic responses to environmental disasters.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• Calitics gives us an update on Valero's mission to kill AB 32.
• Politifact fact-checks Bill Maher's and George Will's energy claims.
• The Oil Drum on decentralization, localization and scale-free self sufficiency of our energy infrastructure.
• ABC Australia lists 10 inventions for a climate-changed future.
• Robert Reich compares BP, Massey Energy and Goldman Sachs in 'The Rebirth of Regulation.'
• NRDC's Dan Lashoff joins the chorus of enviros condemning BP and advocating for emissions reductions.
• TIME reports of Obama's visit to the Gulf Coast.
• Here's the Energy Collective on the leaked tapes from Copenhagen.
• A few Senators are proposing increasing the liability of oil companies in cleaning up after themselves.
• Google is investing $38.8 million in North Dakota wind energy projects, totaling 170 MW of installed capacity.

Too Big to Fail

There has been a lot of commentary over the last few days on the causes and effects of the undersea volcano of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The Obama Administration has been criticized for not reacting quickly enough to the disaster (Katrina, anyone?); the Alabama AG is warning citizens not to rush into a settlement with BP; and still, no one knows how or why this happened in the first place. It is an environmental, political and civil catastrophe, and we are in the thick of Week 1. So we can expect a lot more coverage, anger, and political hedging in the coming weeks. But so far, as much as I can tell, there has been relatively little discussion of the systemic societal conditions that backed us into this corner. If this "spill" (it is far more than that) indicates anything, it is the deep and unfortunately requisite entanglement of energy companies with the federal government. BP is contracted, insured and aided by the government, yet the oil company raked in $6 billion in profits in Q1 2010.

Now, to turn a profit is no societal sin. Indeed, a competitive, entrepreneurial spirit is a key element of the American condition. And the main problem, as I see it, is not runaway capitalism either; this is less a case of unregulated institutional chaos than the banking crash of 2008. No, the problem here isn't too little government involvement--it's too much. Bill Maher put it best over the weekend:

Maher: Oil companies are worse than banks. They're also too big to fail. And their cost to society is also, just like the banks, too great for society to sustain it.

Despite the fact that BP finds itself on the hook for the billions in cleanup and remediation costs, the disaster is still being attended to by the Coast Guard, Homeland Security, Interior, and the President himself. Our national resources are being deployed to respond to a disaster caused by a for-profit company. All of a sudden, we start to notice that energy, the literal lifeblood of our American capitalist economic infrastructure, is helpless without the Invisible Hand of the Government. Here's Vaclav Smil on the subject:

But it would be naive to see these and virtually any other twentieth-century prices either as outcomes of free market competition--or as values closely reflecting the real cost of energy. Long history of governments manipulating energy prices has brought not only unnecessarily higher but also patently lower prices due to subsidies and special regulations affecting distribution, processing, and conversion of fossil fuels, and generating electricity. During the twentieth century governments provided direct financing, research funds, tax credits, and guarantees to advance and subsidize particular development and production activities, thus favoring one form of supply over other forms of energy (Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, 86).

Smil was specifically addressing price controls on energy conversion and extraction, but his point is applied with equal efficacy to global operations in the energy industry. If the heartbeat of the world economy remains linked to the availability of carbon fuels, we will see a rise in government protection, remediation and even acquisition of energy assets. Imagine the current Deepwater Rig explosion, followed by a continuous flood of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but now add in an armed fight over the reservoir between the US and Venezuela, with Russia and Brazil on the sidelines. As they did in the Unocal affair, the US government will increasingly interrupt international private bidding contests for extraction contracts; as we have seen in the Middle East for half a century, armed conflicts over energy will increasingly exacerbate geopolitical tensions already fueled by poverty and religious zealotry. No matter the exact year of global peak oil production, the addition of 2 billion people to this planet by mid-century will precipitate a huge outstripping of demand over supply if we remain addicted to fossil fuels. This addiction will carry the cost of countless lives, as it already has.

We need an energy infrastructure fueled by clean technology, for which the failure of a single link in the chain does not precipitate a disaster like the one we're currently navigating through. We need technological innovation that fuels capitalist competition, not too-big-to-fail institutions like oil companies. We need energy production run by civilians, not armed soliders in the most culturally turbulent region of the world. Reduced terrestrial pollution; decentralized power production; an end to armed conflicts over energy--the greenhouse gas problem doesn't even have to be a variable in the equation to make this a no-brainer.

If we put our hearts into it...

The following is an excerpt from a spectacular history of offshore drilling in The Economist:

To give an idea of the difficulty of deepwater drilling, Mr. Walker uses an analogy. "Imagine a large offshore oil rig as a match box," he says. Next, imagine the matchbox on top of a two-storey building, with the upper floor filled with water and the lower floor filled with rock, sand and, in some cases, salt. Striking an oil reservoir with a drill pipe is then like hitting a coin at the base of the building with a strange of human hair. The penalties for getting it wrong are enormous. An industry rule of thumb puts the cost of drilling a deepwater "dry hole--a well that does not strike oil--at around $100m; BP says it can be as high as $200m.

What's my point? That we are capable of tremendous engineering achievements. The tragic loss of life, environmental devastation and economic disturbance caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf are reminders of our need to refocus our efforts to similar engineering challenges in clean technology. The above analogy is a conceptually accurate metaphor that describes the degree of the challenge we face in decarbonizing the economy. The coin represents a civilization constructed on clean infrastructure and technology, and the human hair represents the human effort and skill required to achieve a clean energy future.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: KGL meltdown and the oilacalypse.

• Check out this Daily Kos post on the bailout of BP.
• Steven Chu at the White House blog on ARPA-E and energy breakthroughs.
• Tom Friedman's latest contribution to his perennial push for a price on carbon.
• Businesses in Michigan are lobbying for legislation to restore competition to electricity markets.
• A decade later, Jerry Brown announces $400 million in rebates for Californians who suffered during the 2000-2001 energy crisis.
• The Economist discusses the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and why the size of the spill isn't as important as where the oil ends up.
• Europe's emissions trading system is in an uproar amid a mounting scandal over 'recycled' carbon permits.
• Ah, remember these guys? Rep. Waxman is requesting info on Halliburton's involvement in the Gulf oil spill.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Tuesday Edition

• T. Boone Pickens and Ted Turner in a video at Fox Business, discussing renewable energy and energy security.
• Here's a Forbes piece on "Nine more myths about electric cars" -- Robert Bryce should take a look.
• Australia has shelved its cap-and-trade program. PM Kevin Rudd blames "political opposition," and the plan will be put on hold unto Kyoto expires in 2012.
• Sir Richard Branson, of Virgin fortune, predicts $200/bbl oil prices in the near future.
• Valero Oil is raking in cash and using it to finance its war against AB 32.
• Spill, baby, spill -- The Economist reports on the recent rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana.
• Solar Feeds provides 10 reasons why Israel is becoming a global clean tech powerhouse.
• Mark Muro at Brookings offers his thoughts on how the COMPETES Act should be implemented.
• Philip Radford of Greenpeace trashes the state-preemption provisions in KGL.
• The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth a) needs a new name and b) has called for an international climate court.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: Earth Day and the death of the linked fee.

• Bill McKibben talks about Eaarth, his conception of the new planet humans have created.
• A blogger at the Council on Foreign Relations performs an autopsy on the linked fee in KGL.
• What's it like to live without electricity? (via @BillGates.)
• A holistic and promising state climate-energy bill was killed yesterday in Wisconsin.
• 11 workers are still missing after an oil rig SANK yesterday in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Secretary Chu announced more than $200 million for solar and water power tech yesterday--glad to see someone in government approaching the energy quest as a technological problem.
• Accenture, a technology consultant, recently published the results of a survey of 9000 consumers on integrated grid management.
• Sen. Lamar Alexander's Earth Day post on nuclear power (via Energy Collective).
• The Energy Bulletin calls April a 'watershed month' for peak oil research.
• Vinod Khosla talks about his venture capital firm's work on energy and transportation technologies.

Energetics Cliff Notes - Friday Edition

The week that was: coal hearings and Lindsey Graham on Earth Day.

• DOE has a report (pdf) on deficiencies in workforce education and training for smart grid jobs.
• Kate Sheppard sums up coal news, from subsidies in Waxman-Markey to the hearings and student protests this week.
• Surprise, surprise - despite a decrease in 2009, global oil demand hits a new high.
• That said, there's a growing chorus of researchers warning of a coming oil supply crunch.
• Ben Tribbett at Huffington Post calls the Southern States the "Saudi Arabia of energy efficiency savings" - in other words, the South has a huge opportunity in negawatt power.
• The Hill's Energy and Environment Blog has the scoop on a new bipartisan effort to invest in electrification of the transportation industry.
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu has some tough love for the US on its clean tech competitiveness.
• President Obama talks mine safety.
• Just for fun, someone should ask Professor of Climatology Sean Hannity what he makes of March 2010 being the warmest March ever recorded.
• Obama budget proposals seek a shift from incentivizing fossil fuels to incentivizing renewables.

Phase out tax subsidies for Big Oil

I just added my name to the Sierra Club's letter to Congress, demanding "Big Oil pay their fair share." Here's the text of the letter:

Dear Congress,

As Americans their fair share of taxes to the federal government this week, we urge you to end subsidies and tax credits for fossil fuel production. At a time when we need to begin reducing global warming pollution, Congress should not waste taxpayer dollars on dirty and polluting fuel sources. Big Oil needs to pay their fair share. Tax payers should not be required to underwrite this dirty, expensive and inefficient fuel. These subsidies and tax shelters must be removed.

Now is a time when we need to invest in truly advances, low-emission energy technologies that will move us away from our addiction to fossil fuels, help protect public health, and create good, green American jobs. Act quickly to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the most devastating and costly impacts of global warming. The U.S. Government should not continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry. Please help make the shift to a clean energy future by removing the tax credits and subsidies.

Click here to sign the letter.