Energy & Environment

On his second day as the new Secretary of the Department of Energy, Ernest Moniz told employees that the cleanup of Hanford is a legal and moral obligation for the department. He must act quickly.
 
Too few Americans know that the world’s largest nuclear waste site, which dates back to the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, resides in Hanford, Wash. It houses massive underground tanks that hold 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, and one million gallons of that waste is thought to be leaking and threatens to contaminate the Columbia River. Read more...

Millions of consumers could soon pay the price of  the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) heedless rush to foist a gasoline blend of 15 percent ethanol, or E15 onto the marketplace. This is yet another harmful manifestation of EPA’s rigid implementation of the fatally flawed  Renewable Fuels Standard.
 
Fundamentally, and what the agency fails to grasp, is that RFS’ inflexible and ever-increasing mandated volume of ethanol-based renewable fuel is completely untethered to reality. Read more...

June marks the official beginning of hurricane season and parts of our country have already witnessed Tropical Storm Andrea, which broke rainfall records in parts of the Eastern Seaboard. Severe weather events seem to be happening with more frequency in the United States. With severe weather—like Superstorm Sandy or the recent string of tornadoes spiraling across the Midwest—come record levels of devastation and rebuilding needs. With our country’s extensive reliance on electrical power for comfort, communication, and safety, a new approach to electrical preparedness and recovery is needed to minimize the personal and economic damage caused by these events. Read more...

A report on greenhouse gas emissions earlier this week by the International Energy Agency will have policymakers once again discussing sustainable energy options.  Reasons for this renewed interest range from energy security to protection of our natural resources.  Paper and wood products manufacturers have long known the benefits of using biomass residues to produce energy and, in optimizing its use, have reduced greenhouse gas emissions 10.5 percent since 2005, with a goal to reach 15 percent by 2020.

How should President Obama and President Xi approach the pressing problem of climate change when they meet this week for talks at Rancho Mirage?  They must start by recognizing that climate protection is a topic that goes far beyond the environment, to implicate and imperil national security, food security, economic growth and job creation, as well as trade and intellectual property protection.
 
Cooperation on clean energy development and deployment is the foundation, and efforts are already underway on this front between the US and China.  The climate cannot be protected without success here.  Expanding the use of natural gas in place of dirty coal will be part of this strategy, including hydraulic fracturing to expand gas supplies.  The US is in the lead with the necessary technology and know-how on fracking, as well as with efforts to ensure protection for the environment.  Plugging gas leaks in the full cycle from extraction to transmission to end-use should be a priority, as even a small leak rate of the methane from unburned natural gas makes the climate footprint of gas as bad as the coal it replaces. Read more...

If Reps. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Scott Peters (D-Calif.) really believe that we are headed for more extreme weather, they should be boosting America’s most affordable and reliable energy sources to cope with these hazards. After all, more electricity would be needed to handle greater demands for air conditioning and heating. More power would be required to irrigate lands, build dikes, strengthen public infrastructure and relocate populations living on flood plains or at risk from tornadoes and hurricanes.
 
Yet, in discussing their solutions to these dangers, Tonko, Connolly and Peters promote wind and solar power, the least reliable and most expensive options available. They should be supporting an expansion of the most reliable and cheapest energy sources such as coal, from which comes about half of America’s electricity.

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You may have noticed a conspicuous shortage of smiling faces at neighborhood gas stations. And that is no surprise — after all, the price of gas leaves consumers with very little to smile about.

But what serious alternatives are there for gasoline-powered automobiles? President Obama spoke grandly about putting one million electric cars on the road by 2015, but American consumers have overwhelmingly shown no interest in sharing this vision. Vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells have also captured the imagination of politicians and the media, but not drivers.

There is also a strident minority that believes compressed natural-gas vehicles represent the future. But it is certainly not representative of the present, with only one car model (the $26,300 Honda Civic GX) and a mere 600 natural-gas fueling stations available in the U.S. today. Again, there is no evidence that this will ever become more than a fringe pursuit.

If Washington wants to spend billions on an alternative fuel source, there is one solution available that deserves serious consideration: chocolate. No, we’re not talking about Snickers or Reese’s Pieces, but the excess waste product that is generated by chocolate factories. Rather than dump the waste chocolate into the trash, this inedible mess can be pumped into fuel tanks.

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It would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago that we’d need to debate whether to export our energy. But the North American energy landscape is changing rapidly, and companies have now requested nearly 20 permits from the federal government to export natural gas. Despite opposition from some on Capitol Hill, environmentalists and petrochemical firms, the Obama administration seems to have decided in favor of exports, announcing recently that it was approving a second permit to export overseas, nearly two years after approving the first, and signaling more may be coming. They made the right call, and should continue to approve natural gas exports on both economic and geopolitical grounds.

As hurricane season begins and vulnerable coastal communities brace for high winds and storm surges, Congress needs to ask itself: What can we be doing to better protect and manage existing and new development along our coastlines?

How can we minimize the destruction of life and property suffered by so many in hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, Irene, and Sandy?

In a move its predecessor would be proud of, the Obama administration has bowed to industry pressure and proposed rules on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” on public lands that put the nation’s water supply at risk of contamination with cancer-causing chemicals.

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