Energy & Environment


During the recent campaign, President Obama dismissed the idea of North American energy independence by 2020, saying “you can’t drill your way out of this.” He was wrong.

Increases in domestic shale gas and oil production, growth in renewable energy, and steady efficiency improvements in all sectors of the economy have put the country on an energy and economic path that few predicted possible. Our country is blessed with diverse and abundant domestic energy resources, but still confronts an array of energy challenges that will demand high-level attention in the years ahead. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) launched the Strategic Energy Policy Initiative in 2011 to address these challenges.

Benjamin Zycher’s Congress Blog post gets several facts wrong about wind power. Let’s set the record straight.

While Zycher, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, invokes Ronald Reagan, it’s worth noting that support for extending the federal wind energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) crosses party lines at every level of leadership. A bipartisan coalition of the nation’s governors formed the Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition to work for extension of the PTC before it expires at the end of December, and congressional delegations from every region of the U.S. include majority, if not unanimous support for extension. Read more...

Since 1998, he has led implementation on a multidisciplinary program of research and development, education, safety, and training. Also the former chairman of the National Energy Resources Organization, Willis is the founding chairman of the Global Technology Network of the World LP Gas Association.
 
Hurricane Sandy reminds us how vulnerable we are to Mother Nature. With wind and water she can wreak havoc, leaving us in the dark and cold, disconnected from the internet and news of the world, standing in long lines for a few gallons of gasoline, and searching for a cell phone signal, hoping the battery doesn't die first.

Few policy issues in the United States have morphed as significantly as climate change in the past two years. Today, national imperatives for economic and energy security dominate views on the environment. At the same time, weather disasters are expanding and global trends toward secure and sustainable energy markets are accelerating.

While climate change is still unsettled as a congressional priority, it is connected to some of the top issues of our time — most notably the links between economic, energy and environmental security and sustainability.

Technological breakthroughs in energy production are creating access to more domestic oil and gas resources than at any time in U.S. history. This is a good thing for America — it generates jobs, reduces the budget deficit, improves productivity and global economic competitiveness, and shrinks the trade deficit. It also rebalances the geopolitical energy order, making the United States and others less dependent on Middle East oil and freer to exert leverage on countries like Iran.
 
For these very reasons, now is the time to price carbon.

For most Americans, the word helium may conjure up images of party balloons and cartoon characters floating in the Thanksgiving Day Parade, but few recognize the essential role it plays in our economy. From high-tech manufacturing to hospitals and scientific labs – our economy and lives in the 21st century are dependent on this lighter-than-air gas. Unfortunately, the impending shutdown of helium sales from the Federal Helium Reserve will create an immediate worldwide helium shortage, threatening our economy and costing tens of thousands of American jobs, unless Congress acts.

As global temperature rise nears 1 degree above pre-industrial levels, the planetary emergency of climate change requires urgent global action. Keeping global emissions within the global carbon budget for a 2 degree world means that we need hard caps on extraction, especially carbon intensive projects like Canada’s tar sands. Unfortunately, Canada has abandoned its responsibilities and reneged on its commitments to meaningfully address climate change, and it is using the United States as its excuse, 

Canada’s emissions targets, much like the Unites States’ own, are far short of the kind of drastic emissions cuts needed to limit warming below the globally agreed ceiling of 2 degree warming. According to Canada’s political leaders, our ambition can only increase after yours to ensure economic harmony with our largest trading partner.

Although it was created with the best of intentions, the federal government’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program has become one of the worst and most costly boondoggles ever foisted on the American public.

Its goal was to reduce American dependence on foreign oil and incentivize the fledging renewable fuel industry. But in the hands of the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it has become a nightmarish mess of out-of-control mandates, over-the-top bureaucracy, and out-and-out fraud.

As our nation’s leaders work to improve our nation’s struggling economy, there is one opportunity we cannot overlook: a responsible exports policy.
 
U.S. Senators and Representatives from across the country have voiced their support for natural gas exports as a unique American opportunity that will create jobs and strengthen our energy security. As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) noted recently, natural gas exports represent “an opportunity to really help tilt the balance of trade in our favor for the first time in decades.”
 
Moreover, President Obama’s 2010 National Export Initiative highlighted the importance of expanded exports to create “sustainable economic growth” as well as “good high-paying jobs.” Natural gas exports are no exception.