General

By Kennedy Maize Can you spell “poser?” Here’s my offering: “Eric Massa (D-N.Y.)” Massa, newly elected Congressman from New York’s 29th district (that’s Corning, the glass folks), showed up in Washington earlier this week to be sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in the 111th Congress, having arrived in the city […]

By Kennedy Maize At a pleasant Christmas dinner with friends last week, a smart diner posed a question: when should the government or the market have known that the U.S. (and the world’s, as it turns out) financial system was in life-threatening peril? After pausing to scratch my head, I proffered an idea: it all […]

By Kennedy Maize Some of my friends on the left have been lamenting the Cabinet choices of president-elect Barack Obama. One of them wrote in an email recently, “As the new government was put together, brick by brick, a disturbing pattern emerged. Time and again, those who had braved the perils of the Clinton… threat […]

By Kennedy Maize Here’s an interesting new wrinkle on wind power, from a researcher at the University of Illinois. According to Somnath Baidya Roy, turbulence from large wind farms can harm growth of crops in the local countryside. Baidya Roy notes that in recent years, wind power has moved from small, isolated turbines to large […]

By Kennedy Maize The Obama administration has picked Steven Chu, currently the director of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. The selection was quite a surprise, as Chu’s name had not surfaced in any of the rumors circulating in Washington. Indeed, he’s not well know in Washington political […]

By Kennedy Maize It’s time for the latest round of the name game, this time focusing on who President Elect Obama will pick to head the Department of Energy. Clearly, the the DOE pick is a second-level decision, after economics and national security. In fact, DOE really doesn’t have much to do with energy. Around […]

By Kennedy Maize Shades of Tommy Gold. The U.S. Geological Survey this week said it has concluded that there are vast “technically recoverable” methane hydrate reserves trapped in the Arctic coastal plain that could provide some 85.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, a significant addition to U.S. natural gas reserves. Gas hydrates, also known […]

By Kennedy Maize Nothing fails like success. Already, Democrats in Congress are at each others’ throats about sharing the spoils from the Obama victory. The most serious fight so far pits Hollywood liberal Henry Waxman against the long-time chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. Waxman has launched a […]

It’s entirely predictable. Once a new president is elected, the most popular topic in Washington becomes “the name game.” Who’s in, who’s out, who will get the political plum jobs. Indeed, there is an official government publication, called The Plum Book, that lists the 7,000 or so political jobs that an incoming administration can appoint […]

More science to stir the pot on the hurricane-global warming issue appears in last Thursday’s issue of Science magazine. Three researchers fundamentally question the conventional wisdom that there is “a causal connection between warming tropical sea surface temperatures and Atlantic hurricane activity.” While many scientists – and even more environmentalists – believe global warming and […]

By Kennedy Maize Can termites lead the way to energy independence? A new study from the University of Florida in Gainsville says the tiny wood chompers and the bacteria in their gut could help turn non-edible plant parts into energetic ethanol. In a paper to be published in the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining, Florida […]

By Kennedy Maize   Evidence builds for the proposition that constructing new high-voltage transmission remains harder than bringing on new power generation. Facing increasing political opposition in West Virginia and Maryland, American Electric Power, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and Allegheny Energy of Greenburg, Pa., last week said they are going to reroute their planned 765-KV, […]

By Kennedy Maize   What will the new president really do once on infrastructure spending, despite the anodyne economic platitudes of the campaign? My guess is we will see the greatest economic stimulus effort since WW2. Deficits be damned. That’s probably good. The economic enemy is deflation, not inflation, if the Great Depression is any […]

A report from the front lines of the alleged global warming war. The Anchorage Daily News reported on Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, that summer snow loss in the state in 2008 was less than winter snowfall, reversing a trend of two centuries. The newspaper said that “unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by […]

Desperate to score points in a crucial state where they are in the double-digit dumps, the Republican McCain-Palin presidential ticket rolled out their heartfelt support for “clean coal technologies” at a rally in Scranton, Pa., this week. Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin appeared in full throat. Her homage to coal, of course, came despite McCain’s […]

It’s gridlock on the road to the U.S. nuclear renaissance. Electric companies and consortia – 15 in all so far — are asking the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for combined construction and operating licenses for 24 new nuclear units under the terms of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. The companies are all seeking the loan […]

Folks, this is a true story. We do not make this stuff up. As the late, great comic Steve Allen used to say, “I kid you not.” An NBC television crew, dispatched to the Arctic to show the horrendous effects of global warming – an ice-free Northwest passage – was stalled in the Arctic Sea […]

Did the now-irrelevant 1997 Kyoto Protocol reduce global carbon dioxide emissions, or even slow the rate of increase? No, according to Global Carbon Project, established in 2001 to measure worldwide, man-made carbon emissions patterns. According to the project’s “Global Carbon Budget,” released Sept. 25, “Anthropogenic CO2 emission have been growing about four times faster since […]

OBE: overcome by events. That’s the story of the nation’s energy policy agenda in the wake of the credit collapse of the past several weeks. In short, there likely will be no new major energy investments in the coming months or years, whether Congress enacts energy legislation or not, or if executive branch agencies implement […]

Cellulosic ethanol? How about cellulosic gasoline and diesel fuel instead? A research team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison has come up with what may be an economic way to produce what a UW press release calls “green gasoline” from the sugars in corn stalks and stover and other plant residues that the Department […]

Where’s Sam? Energy Secretary Sam “The Sham” Bodman has been absent from the discussions in Washington in recent months about energy prices and energy policies. What does this say about Bodman? It says that neither Sam nor the Department of Energy have any influence in Bush administration energy policies. That’s not a bad thing. Energy […]

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is a Malthusian. That’s clear from his latest book – Hot, Flat and Crowded. As such, he’s a wrong-headed fool, in the camp of Paul Ehrlich (a lepidopterist by training), Lester Brown, and the Club of Rome pessimists. Their view is that the world is running out of resources, […]

The Wall Street financial crisis hit Baltimore’s main street on Thursday, as Constellation Energy Group agreed to be bought by Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings for $4.7 billion ($26.50 per share.) Among the victims in the sale could be Constellation’s attempt to build a new, third nuclear generating unit at its Calvert Cliffs site in […]

More evidence that the demise of coal – Al Gore to the contrary notwithstanding – is greatly exaggerated. On Sept. 11, Tulsa-based Alliance Resource Partners announced it will open a new underground coal mine on the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border, digging high-sulfur Pennsylvania No. 8 coal for the utility market. At the same time, the U.S. […]

If you love irony, as I, then you will find this delicious. Hybrid electric vehicle enthusiasts are less than enthusiastic about the plan by natural gas empresario T. Boone Pickens to boost wind electric generation. Pickens has proposed a major expansion of wind power to back out gas generation in electricity markets. That, in turn, […]

My friends, John McCain’s pronouncements in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination as president were entirely bogus when it comes to energy. Unfortunately, so were Barack Obama’s when he accepted the Democratic nomination. Both candidates tout plans for “energy independence,” while neither actually defines the term. What exactly is “energy independence?” Is it zero […]

More evidence that the globe is not catastrophically warming comes from the current issue of Science magazine. A research team led by W.T. Pfeffer of the University of Colorado at Boulder in the current issue of the magazine concludes that current global circulation models vastly overstate the possibilities of sea level rise as a result […]

Just when you thought coal was down for the count, here’s a report from London’s Financial Times. “British coal production looks set to grow for the first time since 2001, thanks to higher prices and power generators’ new-found appreciation of domestic coal supplies.” Coal production in the UK mostly has been falling since the 1950s. […]

Have you noticed that liquefied natural gas has dropped off the charts when it comes to U.S. energy supply projects? Just a few years ago, LNG was a very big deal. Today, new imported gas in liquid form from foreign countries has become a largely dead-end. Why? It’s mostly a matter of domestic gas technology, […]