It looks like the DOE has picked a winner for its SMR (Small Modular nuclear Reactor) grant: (emphasis mine)

WASHINGTON – As part of the Obama Administration’s all-of-the-above strategy to deploy every available source of American energy, the Energy Department today announced an award to support a new project to design, license and help commercialize small modular reactors (SMR) in the United States.  This award follows a funding opportunity announcement in March 2012.  The project supported by the award will be led by Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) in partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Bechtel.  In addition, the Department announced plans to issue a follow-on solicitation open to other companies and manufacturers, focused on furthering small modular reactor efficiency, operations and design.  

“The Obama Administration continues to believe that low-carbon nuclear energy has an important role to play in America’s energy future,” said Secretary Chu.  “Restarting the nation’s nuclear industry and advancing small modular reactor technologies will help create new jobs and export opportunities for American workers and businesses, and ensure we continue to take an all-of-the-above approach to American energy production.”

This project represents a significant investment in first-of-a-kind engineering, design certification and licensing for small modular reactors in the United States. Through a five-year cost-share agreement, the Energy Department will invest up to half of the total project cost, with the project’s industry partners matching this investment by at least one-to-one.  The specific total will be negotiated between the Energy Department and Babcock & Wilcox (B&W). 

The Energy Department investment will help B&W obtain Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing and achieve commercial operations by 2022 – helping to provide U.S. utilities with low carbon energy options as well as create important export opportunities for the United States and advance our nation’s competitive edge in this emerging global industry. The project will be based in Tennessee and will support additional suppliers and operations in Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

The rest from the DOE here.

For more on SMRs, William Tucker wrote about the benefits here. An excerpt:

SMRs have been around almost since the dawn of the nuclear era.  As advocates love to point out, we’ve been building small reactors for the U.S. Navy since the 1950s.  At the height of the Cold War we had 400 nuclear submarines prowling the ocean, many of them operating for five years without refueling.  Today we only have 70 left but we have added 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, each one the equivalent of a small city.  Now the Department of Energy has decided to prime the pump by offering $400 million for the construction of one or two SMR prototypes among the many models that are now circulating.

You could call to this another instance of government research and investment paving the way for private enterprise – “You didn’t build that.  Somebody else made it happen” and all that.  But somehow with all the government money that has been spent of Navy reactors, the transfer has never taken place.  Now the race is on.  

What I don’t get is that it looks as if the government is funding B&W in order to give the company enough cash to meet the NRC licensing hurdles. But as William Tucker pointed out above, we already have Navy reactors that are approved. Isn’t it cheaper to start with or use the Navy designs?

I wrote about this in 2010, when I proposed putting the Navy in charge of small nuclear power plants and selling the energy back to the grid. I don’t see why using $400 million of taxpayer dollars to help B&W build reactors that will look quite similar to reactors already in use is a good investment.

I guess David Petraeus defeated global warming before he retired? New York Times:

The Central Intelligence Agency has disbanded its Center on Climate Change and National Security, a unit formed in 2009 to monitor the interplay between a warming planet and intelligence and security challenges.

The creation of the office drew fire at the time from some Republicans, who said it was an unnecessary expense and a distraction from the agency’s focus on terrorism and other more immediate threats. The agency did not say whether the closing was related to budget constraints or other political pressures.

Todd Ebitz, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency would continue to monitor the security and humanitarian challenges posed by climate change as part of its focus on economic security, but not in a stand-alone office. “The C.I.A. for several years has studied the national security implications of climate change,” Mr. Ebitz said in an e-mailed statement. “As part of a broader realignment of analytic resources, this work continues to be performed by a dedicated team in a new office that looks at economic and energy matters affecting America’s national security. The mission and the resources devoted to it remain essentially unchanged.”

The rest here.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute writes on Real Clear Markets:

Since being re-elected, in a triumph of political loyalty over consumer protection, President Obama has refused to waive the federal requirement that 13 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol be blended in 2013 with gasoline.

In making that decision on November 16, Mr. Obama brushed aside evidence that dedicating corn to ethanol, rather than to animal feed and other food uses, has contributed to a rise in prices. Corn prices are up nearly 40 percent over the past year, and wheat prices are up by 20 percent.

One apparent consequence: prices for corn-fed meat are on the rise. U.S. beef is now $4,900 per ton, up from $3,900 in 2009.

And while he purports to be committed to environmental protection, the president also ignored the findings of some analysts that the production of ethanol–which is an expanding industry–makes air pollution worse.

In the mid-2000s, when Congress imposed renewable fuel mandates, adding ethanol to gasoline was seen as a way to diminish gasoline consumption, reduce oil imports and even curtail tailpipe emissions.

In 2012, the subsidy of 45 cents a gallon expired, along with the 54 cent tariff for imported ethanol. What keeps the ethanol industry afloat is the mandate for the American economy to consume ethanol.

Now, with U.S. crude oil and gas production rising and imports falling, and with a nascent trend under way towards powering motor vehicles with abundant natural gas, the case for ethanol is weak.

But an ethanol lobby has put down tenacious roots, including corn farmers, whose price per bushel has risen from under $4.00 in 2010 to over $7.00 in 2012, and investors who placed capital into ethanol-producing plants.

Of 97 million acres of corn in America, about 40 percent is dedicated to ethanol, shrinking supplies that go into food.

The rest here.

Chris Horner, call your agent. Via Fox News:

House Republicans are investigating allegations that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and other high-ranking agency officials have been conducting official business with email aliases or secret accounts to avoid scrutiny from agency watchdogs and the public.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee is leading the investigation and has asked Jackson to turn over information connected to the email account “Richard Windsor” – one of the alleged alias accounts.

The committee has sent letters to White House lawyers and the EPA inspector general asking them to investigate the allegations and report on their findings by the end of the month.

The rest here.

Possibly the most disturbing aspect of the whole EPA “alias” email account operation – which I uncovered while writing my new book The Liberal War on on Transparency – isn’t the whole invented-by-Carol-I-didn’t-use-email-Browner thing. No, it’s an element screaming out for Steynian attention: The fact that the first or second thing that comes up when searching for Lisa Jackson’s alias of choice, Richard Windsor, is, um, Richard Windsor’s website.  

It is dedicated to, shall we say, a certain fetishistic discipline (purists of one sort of the other will no doubt quibble with my characterization). But as more than one person has commented to me, surely there’s some metaphor for the EPA and its relationship to Americans? You’ve been naughty, using abundant and reliable energy sources to create wealth, and you must be punished. 

Or maybe the tie-in to a forum for all the latest in “sorority spanking” has more to do with the Jackson-Browner sisterhood, singing their pledge to America’s industrial fraternity on the front patios of courthouses across the land?

Anyway, I’m off to scour the EPA’s Lotus Notes directory (more news on that front today!) for “Mistress Lucrezia.” How my eyes have been opened by researching this book; my sheltered existence had left me barren of encounters with headlines such as “Canada’s famous dominatrix”, before this.

To follow up on this post we had from last week on Al Gore’s latest declarations on “dirty weather” and “all weather events now affected by global warming,” Watts Up With That skewered Gore’s hype that 16 million viewers tuned in to listen to his latest nonsense:

Last week, the viewer numbers for his webcast seemed to soar quickly to incredible heights as seen in this screen capture of the broadcast, note the value of 16M circled in red:

That 16 million figure is the views counter for the channel at USTREAM. Mr. Gore and his supporters have claimed these millions of visits represent a success for the broadcast.

But, like with Mr. Gore’s other claims, it folds easily with the slightest scrutiny.

The data gathered from the broadcast doesn’t support  the 16 million viewer total. As analyzed by a telecommunications expert it suggests the final number might be inflated, especially since the Gore team apparently had the “current viewers” count removed from the USTREAM video player, leaving only the total views count. If you look at any other USTREAM live feed, you’ll see two sets of numbers, representing current and total viewers. The current viewers count on Mr. Gore’s channel remained in the 10,000-12,000 range during the part of his broadcast where that number was available. The question is, why would they need to remove the “current viewers” counter mid broadcast?

A second independent analysis of the data suggests that some electronic virtual viewers were involved, concluding from a mathematical analysis of the numbers that “At least 85% of total views were bots cycling every 10 seconds.”.

And there’s more, the Internet traffic reporting website Alexa has monitored USTREAM since its inception, logging the visits. Surprisingly, there’s no traffic blip visible on Alexa from Mr. Gore’s event on November 14-15. Traffic rank actually went down during that 24 hour period.

Great catch. The rest here.

I don’t know. I can think of a lot of ways a carbon tax would be tricky to implement, but here’s a list from the enviro-magazine Grist on their top stumbling-blocks.

Via Heritage:

In a recent interview with Platts Energy Week TV, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), incoming chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, discussed his plans to revise government loan programs that he claimed don’t do enough to boost innovative green energy projects.

“Right now they’re not doing enough to encourage innovation,” Wyden said. “You can have a young person with a promising idea, maybe they got a little bit of private sector support, they got people who buy their product on day one — they’re essentially dumped in the same bucket with Solyndra that didn’t really seem to have much that was innovative.”

That is a bit of revisionist history. In fact, Solyndra’s cylindrical solar panel design was widely hailed as innovative before it went bankrupt in August of last year. President Obama’s reelection campaign even used the term to describe the defunct solar company.

Industry observers once heaped similar praise on Solyndra. It made MIT Technology Review’s list of the nation’s 50 most innovative companies. The Wall Street Journal included Solyndra in its list of the top 50 venture capital-backed firms. The Cleantech Group put the company in its top 10 in 2009.

The rest here.

Media outlets were quick to use Hurricane Sandy as proof of the importance of the Nanny State. “You know when big government is all right for some of the phonies, in government and in the media, who rail constantly against it? When we get hit the way we got hit this week,” ranted The New York Daily News Mike Lupica on November 1 on no more evidence than President Obama showing up in Jersey for a walk around (before quickly getting back on the campaign trail).

Seems Lupica & Co. spoke too soon.

More than two weeks later and large swaths of Metro New York were STILL suffering without power . . . thanks to Big Government. Folks on the streets of Long Island and Rockaway had nothing but contempt for slow-moving FEMA and the local, government-owned utility, Long Island Power Authority. That’s right, government owned.

“LIPA neglected basic maintenance to prevent outages, such as replacing rotting poles and trimming trees around power lines, according to a state report released by the Public Service Commission’s Public Service Department in June. The $3.7 billion-a-year government-owned corporation spent $37.5 million less than committed over five years on hardening the grid to protect against major storm damage, according to the report,” reported Newsday.

So inept was Big Government that even Lupica’s liberal Daily News finally woke up and demanded that LIPA be privatized. Meanwhile, the only thing that seems to be working in Rockaway are volunteers helping the needy. Super Government to the rescue? Never mind.

Satire

Washington, DC, AP – A $1.5 billion “Twinkie Bailout” to save Hostess Brands and 18,500 jobs fell apart Friday after President Obama’s Twinkie Task Force could not come to terms with the Bakery Workers Union.

The multi-billion dollar federal rescue was unpopular with Republicans in Congress – and with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who blamed the company for obesity in America’s children. Hostess promised that it is developing a new, low-cal pastry called the Twinkie Volt. But the union admitted it could not guarantee delivery of Michigan and Ohio to Democrats in 2016.

“Let them go bankrupt,” said the president in a New York Times op-ed.

The maker of Twinkies, Suzie Qs, Wonder Bread, and other iconic baked goods, the 82-year-old Hostess announced plans for liquidation. Industry experts said some of the company’s popular snack cake brands would likely be bought by other baked goods makers. But Mayor Bloomberg declared an immediate ban on Twinkies in New York City effective Sunday.

This is a win for President Obama and enviros. . .

Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) is part of a growing coalition backing a carbon tax as an alternative to costly regulation, giving newfound prominence to an idea once anathema in Washington.

Conservative economists and fossil-fuel lobbyists united in 2009 to fend off climate-change legislation that would have established a cap-and-trade mechanism. They are now locked in a backroom debate over a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions that could raise an estimated $100 billion in its first year.

And also a smart business move for Exxon:

Exxon is the biggest U.S. natural-gas producer. A carbon tax could boost demand for natural gas in U.S. power plants, as gas emits half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned to make electricity. Natural gas futures fell 1.5 percent to $3.703 per million British thermal units today. Gas prices fell to a 10- year low in April after mild winter weather crimped demand for heating fuels while production rose to a record.

Might as well use the feds to put your competition out of business if the opportunity presents itself, no?

While Michigan was casting its electoral votes for Barack Obama this year – an inevitability given his $80 billion auto bailout — the state was soundly rejecting his policies through two major ballot proposals.

Despite the support of Bill Clinton and millions of dollars from the Big Green lobby, a ballot initiative changing the Michigan Constitution to require 25 percent of the state’s power be generated by renewables (i.e., wind) by 2025 went down in flames Election Day by a vote of nearly 2-1, 64 percent to 36 percent. A study by the Mackinac Center and the Beacon Hill Institute estimated that the so-called 25×25 proposal would hike electricity costs by 15 percent at a cost of 10,000 jobs in a manufacturing state that is still struggling to get unemployment under 9 percent — and where industry depends on cheap electricity to remain competitive.

Obama surrogate Clinton publicly endorsed 25×25 during the fall campaign. In addition, the president’s Big Green allies mobilized their national network of wealthy donors to back the initiative with the National League of Conservation Voters throwing in $1.8 million; Green Tech Action Fund, $1.7 million; Blue Green Alliance, $1.4 million; the American Wind Energy Association, $1 million; and Julian H. Robertson Jr., $1 million.

But 25×25 was only the second-most expensive ballot initiative in the state. Big Labor put over $20 million on the line to try and reverse wage and benefit reforms instituted by Mitt Romney’s twin — former private equity mogul turned governor, Rick Snyder.

From the NLRB’s mugging of Boeing to the UAW bailout, Obama has been a reliable tool of Big Labor. Yet Big Labor suffered its second consecutive state rebuke this year when Michigan followed Wisconsin in rejecting union attempts to reverse the fiscally responsible progress of a Republican governor. Proposal 2 would have cemented into the Michigan Constitution state employee contracts covering wages and benefits. It was soundly defeated by voters: 58 percent to 42 percent.

Democrats hoped both initiatives would set precedents for other states. Both were soundly rejected.

If presidential elections are American Idol contests, then state ballot measures are issues tests. Obama is still America’s #1 political celebrity — but even solidly blue-state Michigan prefers red-state economics.

Al Gore recently sat down with The Guardian and acted just as you would expect. My favorite is his attempt to rebrand extremd weather as “dirty weather,” as in weather affected by dirty oil and such. He goes a step beyond that, however, and links “all weather events” to global warming:

On whether Obama’s re-election and the aftermath of Sandy represent a moment for climate change action

I think it definitely is a time when more and more people are focused on the extreme weather that has disrupted so many lives. People who have not really devoted a lot of time to thinking about the climate crisis in the past are now saying to their family and friends: “this is clearly a new time. The weather is just not what it used to be”.

We call it dirty weather because dirty energy creates dirty weather. As the leading edge scientists have been telling us for a few years now, we are long past the point where it is sufficient to say that you can not connect one storm to the climate crisis.

In fact, all weather events are now effected by global warming pollution. There is a difference, as others have said, between systemic causality and linear causality – just as you can’t often say that a person with lung cancer got it definitely because he or she smoked cigarettes throughout their life. You can say smoking cigarettes does cause lung cancer. The fact that the oceans are warmer due to man-made climate change means that storms have more strength and force from the ocean heat energy.

It’s a really nice day here in Miami today. Thank heaven for dirty weather.

Over on the homepage, Michael Tanner has a good piece on the “fiscal cliff” and tax-increase negotiations titled, “Boehner’s Blunder: He’s folded before the game began.”

Well, the editors of the Washington Post wonder why Boehner hasn’t “folded” as easily on climate change as he did on taxes:

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER has made some encouraging statements since last week’s election, pointing toward productive policy-making. This was not one of them:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve had climate change over the last 100 years,” he told USA Today. “What has initiated it, though, has sparked a debate that’s gone on now for the last 10 years.”

The Ohio Republican continued: “I don’t think we’re any closer to the answer than we were 10 years ago.”

President Obama recently sounded some positive notes on climate change, perhaps the most neglected big issue of the 2012 campaign. His comments rekindled hopes of environmentalists that his second term will see more aggressive policymaking to combat global warming than did his first. Mr. Boehner’s words, which appear to mischaracterize the scientific debate on global warming, indicate that blinkered Republican opposition to doing much of anything about the problem may persist.

Climate science is complicated, but the basic physical principles on which the scientific consensus is based are not. Gases such as carbon dioxide trap the energy that pours down on the Earth from the sun, making the Earth habitable. Since the middle of the 20th century, scientists have studied the warming effects of adding large amounts of additional heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, and they have made great progress since then in describing how and why the world is warming, and how that trend is likely to play out years and decades from now.

Scientists use real-world observations to describe the climate’s past, recent and distant. Then they build complex models that reflect those and other observations and run them on supercomputers. After decades of this, nearly every expert agrees that global warming is a problem and that a chief cause is the oil, gas and coal burned by humans. The biggest question now is not whether human-produced greenhouse emissions have an effect but how significant that effect will be.

The rest here.

An excerpt from David Remnick of the New Yorker and a call for “No More Magical Thinking” on climate change:

Barack Obama can take pride in having fought off a formidable array of deep-pocketed revanchists. As President, however, he is faced with an infinitely larger challenge, one that went unmentioned in the debates but that poses a graver threat than any “fiscal cliff.” Ever since 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen, a leading climate scientist, testified before the Senate, the public has been exposed to the issue of global warming. More recently, the consequences have come into painfully sharp focus. In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and the intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Pentagon, that bastion of woolly radicals, did what the many denialists in the House of Representatives refuse to do: accept the basic science.

The economic impact of weather events that are almost certainly related to the warming of the earth—the European heat wave of 2003 (which left fifty thousand people dead), the Russian heat waves and forest fires of 2010, the droughts last year in Texas and Oklahoma, and the preëlection natural catastrophe known as Sandy—has been immense. The German insurer Munich Re estimates that the cost of weather-related calamities in North America over the past three decades amounts to thirty-four billion dollars a year. Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, has said that Sandy will cost his state alone thirty-three billion. Harder to measure is the human toll around the world—the lives and communities disrupted and destroyed.

The whole thing here.

No mention of the “magical thinking” among the warmists — that, even if everything written above is true, nothing we can do now will stop the heating in their models. Let’s see the climate-change believers take the politically tough steps like a halt to building on the Jersey Shore, downtown NYC, and coastal Long Island. Because, as their models tell them, these area can’t be saved.

When Governors Cuomo and Christie and Nanny-in-Chief Bloomberg actually back up their rhetoric with action, then I’ll start paying attention.

From the Texas Public Policy Foundation:

AUSTIN – Texas Public Policy Foundation analysts Bill Peacock and Josiah Neeley today released a new report, The Cost of the Production Tax Credit and Renewable Energy Subsidies in Texas. 

The Production Tax Credit (PTC), a federal tax credit which subsidizes the production of renewable energy, is set to expire at the end of 2012.

“The continuation of the Production Tax Credit will cause more disruption in electricity markets and impose higher costs on consumers and taxpayers,” said Bill Peacock, the Foundation’s Vice President of Research and Director of the Center for Economic Freedom. “The negative consequences of the Production Tax Credit are even more apparent in Texas, as it has more wind-generated electricity than any other state.”

According to the report, the PTC’s current annual cost in Texas alone is approximately $567 million. If continued, the cost of the PTC in Texas would run about $4.1 billion through the 10 years ending in 2015.

The PTC is only one of the subsidies available to renewable energy producers in Texas. Others available in Texas include Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) under the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, federal grants under the 2009 stimulus bill, and access to transmission through the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone (CREZ) program. Altogether, renewable energy subsidies in Texas, including PTC, will cost taxpayers and consumers about $12.9 billion over the same period.

Despite the mature nature of the wind industry, the cost of renewable subsidies in Texas is on the rise as are the costs imposed on the Texas electricity market.

“Texas is undergoing a major debate over whether price signals are adequate to maintain resource adequacy,” said Josiah Neeley, policy analyst for the Foundation’s Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment.  “A significant portion of the problem with price signals can be directly attributed to the subsidies for wind generation, particularly the Production Tax Credit.”

“Electric competition is working in Texas; rather, it is government interference with the market led by the Production Tax Credit that is causing today’s concerns regarding reliability. Congress should allow the Production Tax Credit to expire. If not, consumers, taxpayers, and Texas’ world-class energy-only electricity market will pay the price,” said Peacock.

In The Liberal War on on Transparency, published by Threshold Editions last month, I revealed the existence of a series of black, or “alias” email accounts used by EPA administrators. These were actively instituted by none other than Carol Browner, who designed her own secret address, for an account that I also learned was set to “auto-delete”.

You remember Ms. Browner? She’s the lady who suddenly ordered her computer hard drive be reformatted and backup tapes be erased, just hours after a federal court issued a “preserve” order that her lawyers at the Clinton Justice Department insisted they hadn’t yet told her about? She’s the one who said it didn’t matter because she didn’t use her computer for email anyway? Yes, that one.

These alias accounts, which originated under Browner and are now used by Browner’s successor, are the subject of a lawsuit that I, and two colleagues at CEI, filed. They are grounded in information that I uncovered while writing The Liberal War on Transparency.

In response to my book, not one but two former fairly senior EPA officials have contacted me to provide the alias used by Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, to keep her mail secret. I was told it was “one of the alternate email addresses she used.”

Ms. Jackson is the “eco-warrior”, “most progressive EPA chief in history” — pushing Obama’s backdoor march (other ways “of skinning the cat”) toward cap-and-trade.

Or, as you may come to know her, “Richard Windsor.” This morning, we proceeded with a request under the Freedom of Information Act (in-boxes don’t close on federal holidays) in order to find out what she was saying in private about her radical plan to avoid public scrutiny.

“Richard Windsor.” That is the name — sorry, one of the alias names — used by Obama’s radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it. 

And Fisker denies it’s design was at fault for the cars that caught fire:

. . .[Fisker] said it has concluded–after “a thorough investigation witnessed by NHTSA representatives”–that the cause was residual salt damage inside a Vehicle Control Unit submerged in seawater for several hours.

Corrosion from the salt caused a short circuit in the unit, which led to a fire when the Karma’s 12-Volt battery fed power into the circuit.

Heavy winds then spread that fire to other Karmas parked nearby. But, the factory said, there were no explosions, as had been incorrectly reported.

The company ruled out the cars’ 20-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery packs as a cause of, or even a contributing factor to, the blaze.

(That battery pack was the subject of a Fisker recall earlier this year, when now-bankrupt battery maker A123 Systems said its Michigan plant had produced defective cells.)

Fisker called the control unit “a standard component found in many types of vehicles,” and noted that several other “non-hybrid cars from a variety of manufacturers” caught fire in separate incidents after the flood waters receded.

Thousands of vehicles from many different makers were destroyed by the flooding at the huge vehicle-handling facility, which left cars submerged in 5 to 8 feet of salty water for several hours.

I guess this is good news?

Via the New Zealand Herald:

New Zealand will not sign up for fresh commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, Climate Change Minister Tim Groser announced yesterday.

The climate change treaty’s first commitment period expires at the end of the year and New Zealand expects to slightly exceed its target.

But it is joining Japan, Canada and Russia – and parting company with Europe and Australia – in pulling out of the Kyoto system going forward.

Groser said Kyoto would now cover only about 15 per cent of global emissions.

It was better to contribute to efforts under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to reach a deal that would tackle the lion’s share of the problem.

There was just too much uncertainty about what would be achieved in international climate talks, and by when, for New Zealand to lock itself into another binding commitment, most likely until 2020.

“I don’t think it is on balance in New Zealand’s interests to be stuck in the Kyoto space for another eight years,” Groser said. “I don’t want to tie a future Government’s hands to that for eight years.”

The rest here.

MLive.com:

Voters rejected Proposal 3, opting not to put the renewable energy mandate in the state’s constitution.

Opposition group Clean Affordable Renewable Energy (CARE) for Michigan claimed victory in defeating the proposal that it said would lead to higher electric bills. It made the call at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

The measure lost 63 percent to 37 percent with 93 percent of precincts reporting.

Known as the 25 by 25 proposal, it would have amended the constitution to require Michigan utilities to derive at least 25 percent of their annual electric retail sales from clean renewable sources, including wind, solar, biomass and hydropower, by 2025. It also called for providers to limit rate increases to 1 percent per year to cover costs associated with meeting the standard.

The state will continue working toward its mandate of 10 percent renewable energy by 2015, as required by a 2008 law.

“The overwhelming rejection of Proposal 3 is an endorsement that the state’s existing energy policy is working,” CARE campaign manager Howard Edelson said in a statement. “Voters understand that out-of-state billionaires should not be driving Michigan’s energy future. They also recognized the state’s hometown energy providers are continuing their commitment to renewable energy projects, and protecting the environment while keeping costs down.”

The rest here.