How effective is wind energy?

Case van Kooten has an interesting working paper here showing that the impact of wind on C02 emissions is highly variable. First, the opportunity cost matters a great deal. If people are relying on hydro or nuclear power and they switch to wind, emissions decrease very little. Second, wind power tends to be intermittent, requiring other sources to be available when the wind's not blowing. If other flexible sources are going to turn out to be fossil fuels, and, worse, if those fossil fuel-burning plants are hard to start up and turn off, then again we'd expect to see only a small reduction in CO2 emissions from use of wind.

Natural Gas in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's Natural Gas reserves alone could power the US for 10-15 years, according to this article on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's website. Like any kind of mining, extraction can be environmentally difficult, though it sounds like appropriate care can mitigate a lot of the problems. However nasty it might be, I'd much rather have it going on in this country where it can be carefully monitored instead of leaving it to be extracted in the Middle East or other places and then have it traveling here in tankers.

Obama & renewables

President Obama visited MIT yesterday and spoke about renewable energy. It looks to me like now that some sort of health plan seems to be in the bag, he's moving on to climate change.

Solving the nation's problems, one by one.... We'll see what happens on this one!

Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma?

Interesting article in today's NYT about natural gas, and it mentions "Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City." Huh?!

New techniques for extracting natural gas have increased estimated world reserves by a MINIMUM of 50%, and some claim that over 600 years' worth of US consumption could be out there. This is nice for many reasons, including freeing the EU from dependence on Russia, who in the past have frozen out parts of Europe by cutting off supplies of natural gas during the winter, but also because natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than most fossil fuels. The combustion of natural gas emits almost 30 percent less carbon dioxide than oil, and just under 45 percent less carbon dioxide than coal. Also, the US has considerable shale reserves, as shown on the map about halfway down this page. It's tough to predict where our future energy will come from, but this seems a pretty promising candidate!

Going to jail to protect resources

When the Bush administration in its last days opened up large areas of land for drilling, this 27-year old economics student stepped in to mess up the process. By disrupting the leases, he sought to protect the land, and he succeeded, but now he's going to court for what he's done. Read the story! It's short and interesting and right here.

It raises lots of interesting questions, including who decides how to value different resources (oil vs. beautiful lands) and how they make that decision. Since few people travel to rural Utah to see some of these spectacular areas (though the Park Service conspicuously chooses to have people in a number of these shots) does that mean they are less valuable and don't merit government protection? That's exactly what Bush administration officials thought. They've since been overruled by Obama administration officials- at least for the next few years! More to come, obviously....

Fishing failing in Alaska

I knew that salmon fisheries in Oregon, Washington, and California had fallen upon hard times, but I didn't realize that Alaskan king salmon too were failing. I'm sure there are always ebbs and flows in the population, so maybe this isn't a big deal, but people sound pretty worried about it. That would be a huge loss to all of us- that fishery has been tremendously productive. Read the full article here.

Maryland considering offshore wind power

Apparently I'm pretty late in picking up this story, but here's a link: 12 miles off Ocean City may soon be some industrial-sized windmills. I guess that's far enough away that they won't be visible from the beach, which is probably key.

I wonder how BG&E feels about this, with all their recent investments in nuclear....