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Anti-immigrant groups hide agenda behind environmental concerns

Via Feministing, it appears a group of anti-immigration organizations are trying to cloak their agenda in environmental concerns. They took out this half-page ad in The New York Times last […]

Caribbean monk seal is extinct

The Caribbean monk seal is extinct, U.S. officials declared Friday. The seals, also called West Indian seals, have been on the endangered-species list since 1967; the last confirmed sighting of […]

Snippets from the news

• Toyota develops new fuel-cell hybrid. • Yucca Mountain safety plan is “doomed.” • British eco-town plan could be cut from ten to five. • Three air pollutants decline in […]

Vermont-sized area of Amazon may be protected

Brazil’s president has unveiled plans to protect a large area of the Amazon rainforest, after weeks of mutterings that the country has insufficient protections in place. The proposal by President […]

Snippets from the news

• Bush says will veto plan to fund rural schools and libraries with paid-back oil royalties. • Common pesticides linked to diabetes. • Could liquefied-natural-gas project help salmon? • Stop […]

Inhofe: Gore wrong 100 percent of the time

“Almost everything in his movie, in fact, everything has been refuted.” — Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth opera to open by 2011, U.S. public transit overwhelmed, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: The Future’s Coming Fast Rough Ridership ‘How Now?’ Frowns Dow

Coal is no longer cheap — so what comes next?

This article first appeared in Spark, and is reprinted here with their permission. It's somewhat long, and it's got numbers and graphs. It helps if you imagine Scarlett Johansson reading it.

When it comes to power generation, coal isn't cheap. Both power plant and fuel costs are up by nearly 300%, and projected to rise farther¹. Even before factoring in the risks of future greenhouse gas legislation, this has conspired to make a bet on coal-fired central station power equivalent to a bet on massive retail power price increases. Increasingly, this is a bet that neither equity nor debt providers are willing to take.

And yet we continue to operate under the assumption that coal is cheap -- to the extent that we have largely framed our greenhouse gas policy conversation as a tradeoff between environmental stewardship and the cheap coal fantasy.

On balance, this is good news, because it means that the perceived conflict at the heart of our current climate change debate is false. We need not quibble about whether or not we can afford to address global warming; indeed, we can lower greenhouse gases and grow the economy. But first, we have to get beyond coal.

The Electric Sector's Role in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In the United States, coal is primarily a power plant fuel, and the electricity sector is our single biggest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, any discussion of greenhouse gas reduction must confront coal-based electricity. Figure 1 shows total US greenhouse gas emissions by sector, and Figure 2 shows how the electric sector has steadily increased its share thereof.

Figure 1: 2005 US Greenhouse Gas Emissions, By Source²

Canadian government offers $300, other incentives to scrap older cars

If you live in Canada and high gasoline prices have you considering whether to ditch your car, consider this winning deal: Turn over your pre-1996 vehicle to be scrapped and […]

Richard Revesz responds to Lisa Heinzerling, defending cost-benefit analysis

This post continues a dialogue with professor Lisa Heinzerling: see Revesz's initial post and Heinzerling's response.

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Cost-benefit analysis, correctly applied to many environmental problems, will show that strong environmental regulation is often economically efficient. Although some environmentalists, including Lisa Heinzerling in a recent post, have expressed reservations about the use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate environmental rules, rejecting cost-benefit analysis instead of seeking to reform it would be a major strategic error for the environmental movement.