Climate change, environment and energy update

Gasoline Taxes by State

Is This Our Future?

Though the Volt has its share of flaws, it is unquestionably a good car. More to the point, as I discovered when I drove it, the Volt makes sense for the economic and cultural moment we’re in now. The psychological grip it held me in, the smugness I felt as I drove past gas stations, the way it implicitly encouraged me to stick with battery power as much as I could — others are going to feel that as well. Somewhat to my surprise, I actually felt a pang of enviro-guilt when I gave the car back and returned to my gas-guzzling ways. Mr. Farah told me that Volt owners often drove 1,000 miles or more before they needed to buy gasoline. I believe it. It has extremely high word-of-mouth potential.
The second thing it convinced me of is that the electric car is no longer some environmental pipe dream. Several years ago, I drove the Tesla, and though it was a wonderful experience, its high price and limited utility did not give me confidence that electric cars were ready for prime time. The Volt has made a believer out of me. At this moment of maximum uncertainty about how the future will play out, the Volt is comforting in its combination of new technology and old. Eventually, we’ll have batteries that can get 300 miles per charge, and an infrastructure solution that will replace gas stations. Eventually.
In the meantime, we’ve got the Volt. It’s a start.

Oil Oozes Through Your Life

Take a typical barrel of oil. About 46 percent of it is refined into gasoline, and another 40 percent or so is turned into jet and fuel oil. Only about 2 percent becomes petrochemicals like polyethylene and benzene for everyday products (with the rest going to other uses).
Yet that 2 percent has a pervasive reach, as suggested by the accompanying chart. “Oil, no pun intended, seeps into just about everything in the economy,” said David Garfield, a managing director at the consultancy AlixPartners. And though petrochemicals usually aren’t burned for fuel, they share in the environmental impact of petroleum when extracted and refined using energy-intensive methods.
When oil prices go up, as they have markedly in the past year, companies reassess how they transport items, try to cut down on energy costs, and look for alternatives to petroleum-based materials. For example, some are replacing the hard-to-open plastic clamshell packaging that many consumers find so annoying. But, said Michael Pishko, head of the department of chemical engineering at Texas A & M, there are only a few alternatives to petroleum-based chemicals (one is natural gas as a base for polyethylene). “Beyond that, it becomes very difficult to compete with petroleum, even petroleum at $100 a barrel,” Dr. Pishko said.
Michael Watts, a professor of geography and development studies at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed. “The complexity of these hydrocarbons is sort of remarkable,” he said. Even as a critic of oil dependency, he concedes that petroleum’s versatility is impressive: Not only does the American farm and grocery network rely on cheap fuel for low-cost shipping between the coasts, but food itself is grown using petroleum-based fertilizer. (Oil byproducts for food typically fall under federal regulation, although that doesn’t satisfy critics of petroleum-derived food colorings, for example.)
What will it take to wean us off oil? Professor Watts says the question forces scrutiny of “a very complicated set of connections in which what we’re confronting, because of this dependency, is not just, ‘Let’s develop a Prius.’ ”

A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

The 1847 lecture that predicted human-induced climate change

World's oceans in 'shocking' decline

World's Oceans In "Shocking" Decline, Scientists Say

The Oil Under Los Angeles

Soaring emissions. The rhetoric about environmental controls killing jobs is getting louder and louder

Lawmakers Seek Inquiry of Natural Gas Industry

Federal lawmakers called Tuesday on several agencies, including the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the Energy Information Administration and the Government Accountability Office, to investigate whether the natural gas industry has provided an accurate picture to investors of the long-term profitability of their wells and the amount of gas these wells can produce.
“Given the rapid growth of the shale gas industry and its growing importance for our country’s energy portfolio, I urge the S.E.C. to quickly investigate whether investors have been intentionally misled,” wrote Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, in one of three letters sent to the commission by four federal lawmakers, all Democrats.
The calls for investigations came amid growing questions about the environmental and financial risks surrounding natural gas drilling and especially a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, used to release gas trapped underground in shale formations.
Members of the House Committee on Natural Resources said they hoped to hold a hearing in the next several weeks to discuss natural gas drilling.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reaching Record Highs

China eyes Canada oil, US's energy nest egg

Canada and Its Tar Sands: What the Country Can Learn From Brazil About Protecting the Environment

THE PROVINCE’S TAR sands cover an area larger than the United Kingdom and contain most of the world’s supply of bitumen, a particularly sticky form of petroleum that must be heated or diluted before it can be pumped. Because it’s so unwieldy, it’s only been in recent years that large-scale development of the tar sands have taken place. The steep rise in global oil prices has set off a boom in the region, with all that naturally follows (prostitutes have reported incomes as high as $15,000 a week).
But this is a boom unlike others. It’s the first huge oil play of the global-warming era, the first time we’ve dangerously stepped onto new turf, even though we understand the stakes.
NASA’s James Hansen, the earth’s premier climatologist, has laid out these stakes with some precision. His team found in 2008 that, if the atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeds 350 parts per million, we won’t be able to have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization exists and to which life on earth is adapted.” We’re at 390 parts per million right now, and, what do you know, the Arctic is melting rapidly, the atmosphere is getting steadily wetter, and the oceans are turning sharply more acid. Follow Hansen’s math a little further: If we wean ourselves from fossil fuels by 2030, then the earth’s CO2 levels will begin to fall, and, by century’s end, we’ll be back near 350. Damage will be done in the meantime, but perhaps survivable damage. And, conveniently, the world’s supply of “conventional,” easy-to-get-at oil is starting to dwindle: The deposits in places like Saudi Arabia, which were built long before anyone had heard of climate change, are nearing the autumn of their lives. We could, in other words, use this moment of declining oil supply as a spur to make the leap toward renewable energy—a gut-wrenching leap, but one that, if we landed successfully, would put us in a new world.
But two things could prolong our addiction to the point where irrevocable damage is assured: coal and unconventional oil. If we keep burning these substances, then the atmospheric level of CO2 will continue to rise steadily. Which brings us back to Alberta, currently gearing up to develop more of that unconventional oil. The province’s oil minister, Ron Liepert, recently told the Financial Times that Alberta was going “full speed ahead” in an effort to double production by the end of the century; indeed, he said, technological progress might allow the province to find new ways to extract oil from other formations, further increasing production and moving Canada into the top tier of the world’s oil producers, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia. Liepert said his government was “proceeding all out” to find new markets for the oil, and that he was hopeful not only of building a huge new pipeline to the U.S, but also of selling to China, which he said would “take every drop” of the tar sands oil.

The Facts About Fracking

Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush