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Obama's Nuclear Dreams: Resurrecting a Noxious Industry |
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Go to Original Tuesday 09 March 2010 by: Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis "...even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement."
He may soon be called the nuclear industry's Golden Child. No president in the last three decades has put more taxpayer dollars behind atom power than Barack Obama. And there may be good reason why the president is salivating over the prospect of building new nuclear power plants around the country. It was one of the most important issues of the 2008 presidential campaign. The perceived threat of global warming began to make even the most skeptical of politicians a bit nervous. Both the Democrats and Republicans proposed searching for more domestic oil supplies, promising to drill up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains and even off the fragile coastlines of Florida and California. The future of planet Earth, they claimed, is more perilous than ever. Al Gore made his impact. Too bad the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache and no buzz. The purported solution the Obama administration has heaved at the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Yet, Obama isn't the first Democrat in recent years to tout nuclear virtues. |
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The Dirty Truth Behind Clean Coal |
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Go to Original Saturday 27 February 2010 by: Joshua Frank, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis If you've tuned in to the Winter Olympics this past week, you likely sat through repeated showings of a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign paid for by Big Coal regarding the potential laurels of "clean-coal" technology. The premise of the 30-second spot is simple: Coal can be clean and America needs to wean itself off of foreign crude and create jobs back home by tapping our nation's vast coal reserves. Indeed, the effort to paint coal as environmentally friendly is not an easy endeavor, especially when the climate movement has picked up speed and lambasted the industry for contributing more than its fair share to the global warming dilemma. Activists around the world have targeted coal for a number of reasons. First, coal is still plentiful (compared to gas and oil) so stopping its use will largely curtail carbon output down the road. Second, it is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Lastly, in the US the fleet of coal-fired power plants is almost old enough to file for Medicare, so these aging plants are sitting ducks for closure efforts. "NASA climate scientist James Hansen ... has demonstrated two things in recent papers," writes environmental author and activist Bill McKibben about the need to axe coal. "One, that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with the 'planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.' And two, that the world as a whole must stop burning coal by 2030 - and the developed world well before that - if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number." If this were a prize fight, Big Coal would be the battered boxer in the corner of the ring, shuffling away in an attempt to avoid the repeated jabs anti-coal warriors and scientists have been tossing its way. In 2009, not one new coal plant broke ground in the United States. Over 100 new plants were canceled or abandoned, largely due to the public's awareness that coal isn't the fuel of the future but a scourge of the past. |
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Friday 18 December 2009 by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed Dealing with Sarah Palin, in the immortal words of Pee Wee Herman, is like unraveling a giant cable-knit sweater that someone just keeps knitting, and knitting and knitting. There is no end to it, no bottom to this ocean of idiocy, as evidenced by the latest iteration of the Palin phenomenon: out of the cold, clear blue sky, the former Alaska governor and internationally-renowned dunderhead, has declared herself an expert on global climate change in general, and on the Copenhagen summit in particular. Come again? This is the person who burnished her foreign policy credentials by declaring she could see Russia from her house, and had repelled an incursion of Russian bombers with her good looks and charm. This is the person who thought we were at war with Iran. This is the person who continues to hammer on the "death panel" canard in the health care debate while jumping on board with the brain donors who think Obama has no birth certificate and is a Muslim hater of Charlie Brown cartoons. This is the person who talked about the "quitter's way out" during the speech she gave announcing she was quitting the Alaska governorship. |
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Palin's Climate "Epiphany" |
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Tuesday 15 December 2009 by: Eugene Robinson, Op-Ed Washington - Sarah Palin is such a cold-eyed skeptic about the Copenhagen summit on climate change that it's no surprise she would call on President Obama not to attend. After all, Obama might join other leaders in acknowledging that warming is a "global challenge." He might entertain "opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." He might even explore ways to "participate in carbon-trading markets." Oh, wait. Those quotes aren't from some smug Euro-socialist manifesto. They're from an administrative order Palin signed in September 2007, as governor of Alaska, establishing a "sub-Cabinet" of top state officials to develop a strategy for dealing with climate change. Back then, Palin was governor of a state where "coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans," as she wrote. Faced with that reality, she sensibly formed the high-level working group to chart a course of action. "Climate change is not just an environmental issue," wrote Palin. "It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans." Palin mentioned having created the climate change unit in an op-ed piece she wrote last week for The Washington Post. What she didn't acknowledge was the contrast between what she says about climate change now and what she said -- and did -- about it as governor of our most at-risk state. When she was in office, Palin treated the issue as serious, complex and worthy of urgent attention. Now that she's the iconic leader of a populist movement that reacts with anger at the slightest whiff of pointy-headed, "one world" intellectualism, she writes as if the whole idea of seeking ways to mitigate climate change is a crock. |
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Goldman Sachs: Friend of Planet Earth |
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Go to Original Monday 14 December 2009 by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed O.K., I have now said something nice about Goldman Sachs. And, there is actually some truth in this title. Some people have pointed out that Goldman Sachs is one of the main forces lobbying for the cap-and-trade system of carbon permits that lies at the heart of the House-approved bill to combat climate change. Under this proposal, a certain amount of carbon permits would be issued each year. These permits would allow oil companies, utilities, and other manufacturers to emit a set amount of carbon dioxide each year. The total amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the country would be restricted by the amount of permits issued. Some amount of permits would be grandfathered - handed out to coal burning utilities and other major emitters. The rest would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, raising revenue for the government. Both the auctioned and the grandfathered permits could be resold in the secondary market. This gives an incentive for large emitters to reduce their emissions, since they can then profit from selling their permits to others. Many environmentalists have objected to the permit system, arguing that a direct tax on carbon emissions would be easier and cheaper to administer. This is probably true. They have also pointed out that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms have been major proponents of the cap-and-trade system. They argue that these firms stand to make billions off the permits. This is absolutely true, but the story is actually not as devious as some seem to believe. While there can be bubbles in carbon permits, just like there can be bubbles in wheat, corn, Internet stocks, or anything else traded in markets, there is no reason to believe that carbon permits are especially susceptible to bubbles, or that this has anything to do with Goldman's interest in the system. |
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Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. |
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