Climate change and energy update

In big energy speech today, Obama refuses to tell Americans which party has blocked fuel economy standards and demanded deep cuts in clean energy

Can We Do Without the Mideast?

What a clean-energy standard is, and why we’re talking about it

A Clean Energy Standard: Getting the United States Back Into the Clean Energy Race

Less than 50 Years of Oil Left, HSBC Warns

The world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption, while surging demand from the developing world threatens to create “very significant price rises” before substitutes like biofuels can serve as viable alternatives, the British bank HSBC warns in a new report. 

“We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left,” Karen Ward, the bank’s senior global economist, said in an interview on CNBC.

Tucking Carbon Into the Ground

Ethanol Industry Hoping for Surge

Right now, controversy is heating up in Congress over a 45 cents-a-gallon tax credit for blending ethanol with gasoline, known as the “volumetric ethanol excise tax credit,” which was supposed to expire in December 2010 but was extended for one year. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is leading the charge to repeal the credit. Several ethanol industry groups — with some support from lawmakers in corn-growing places like Iowa — are trying to keep it. 

The scheduled expiration is “going to force a serious conversation on how this country wants to incent ethanol,” said Mr. Coleman of the ethanol group. The current tax credit does not distinguish between corn and cellulosic ethanol, and Mr. Coleman said any reform “should and likely will contain” provisions that would specifically provide incentives for advanced ethanol.

Nuclear Industry Thrives in the U.S., but for Export

Mr. Gates is an investor with Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, in a company called TerraPower, which has developed a design for something called the traveling wave reactor. For the most part, it makes its fuel as it runs, taking extra neutrons released in the chain reaction and using them to turn a low-value form of uranium into plutonium, which is almost immediately consumed. The approach means that a country could have nuclear power without bothering with enrichment plants, which are a route to nuclear weapons. 

While the traveling wave is an American design, Mr. Huntsman noted, “right now the regulatory environment here in the United States means it would take decades just to certify. By partnering with the Chinese, they can move ahead and commercialize the technology around the world when it’s proven.”

An Energy Plan Derailed by Events Is Being Retooled

Trading Pumps for Plugs: We Aren’t There Yet

In January 2010, the market research firm IHS Global Insight declared that “plugged-in vehicles” — a category that includes plug-in hybrids and fully electric vehicles — would make up 20 percent of the global market for light vehicles by the end of the decade. In November, Bloomberg New Energy Finance speculated that sales of such cars could hit 1.6 million, or 9 percent of the American market, by 2020 and perhaps 4 million, or 22 percent of the market, by 2030. 

That would seem roughly in line with Mr. Obama’s goal, but Mr. Jaffe thinks that’s a bit unrealistic. He predicted that even by the end of 2011, only about 74,000 electric vehicles would be on the nation’s highways, including conversions and street-legal golf carts. That would be out of a total of 250 million cars and trucks, or about 135 million traditional passenger cars, according to the latest government figures. 

Mr. Jaffe estimates the number of electric vehicles will hit 885,000 by 2015. It’s a solid, if modest number, and by then, most of the early adopters will have, well, adopted.

Building Better Batteries for Electric Cars

Start-Ups Work to Reinvent the Combustion Engine

Offshore Wind Backbone Begins to Take Shape

Coal, Jobs and America’s Energy Future