Well, duh. 

Oops.

Homeowners on the hunt for sparkling solar panels are lured by ads filled with images of pristine landscapes and bright sunshine, and words about the technology’s benefits for the environment — and the wallet.

What customers may not know is that there’s a dirtier side.

While solar is a far less polluting energy source than coal or natural gas, many panel makers are nevertheless grappling with a hazardous waste problem. Fueled partly by billions in government incentives, the industry is creating millions of solar panels each year and, in the process, millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water

Bonus points for the file photo of Solyndra.

A letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun:

Kudos to Mike Tidwell for his clear commentary explaining why we need a revenue-neutral carbon tax to reduce emissions and slow climate change (“Forecast calls for pain,” Feb. 6). I’m convinced, but how are the American people going to convince Congress to pass such a tax?

Readers should go to Washington, D.C. on Feb. 17 for a noon rally and march assembling on the mall near the Washington Monument. The goal of the march is to let President Barack Obama know we have his back on his plans to impose more EPA regulations, to deny permission to build the Keystone XL pipeline, and whatever other environmental orders he chooses to issue with his executive authority. The longer Congress takes to pass a carbon tax, the more pain businesses will have to endure with extra regulations.

My prediction: Snow, ice and generally arctic conditions will greet the global-warming alarmists. Any takers?

First CNN’s Deb Feyerick made the media-accepted claim that any extreme weather event can be tied to global warming — even snow. Here’s Feyerick, via Newsbusters, reporting on winter-storm Nemo:

“Every time we see a storm like this lately, the first question to pop into a lot of people’s minds is whether or not global warming is to blame? I’ll talk to Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ about devastating storms and climate change.”

But then I hope she was joking when she said this about the asteroid that’s due to make a close pass to Earth on Friday:

“Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Bill Nye, however, declined to answer her question.

If you’re a struggling electric-car company and you’re trying to impress the media, it’s best not to lend said media an electric car that has to be towed between charging stations.

The entire (comical) piece from the Times here, but this picture says it all. What good is an all-electric car if it can’t even make it between charging stations that, in this case, Tesla itself set up? 

Editor’s Note: This post originally incorrectly identified the company that was the subject of the electric car failure as Fisker. The two companies are not related. 

WSJ:

U.S. Coal Finds Warm Embrace Overseas

On 67 acres here along the James River, almost 800,000 tons of coal tower in two-story-high stacks, ready to go overseas. The shipping terminal is so busy that this past Christmas Day, workers volunteered for lucrative overtime to load a bulk carrier.

Coal-terminal operator Dominion Terminal Associates, owned by three big mining firms and one of the biggest coal exporters in the U.S., stands at the center of a surprising boom.

For all the troubles of the U.S. coal industry at home, its business with the rest of the world is brisk. Last year, the U.S. set a record for coal exports, with the final tally estimated to top 120 million tons, double what it exported as recently as 2009.

The boom isn’t about feeding the voracious appetites of China and India—not yet. Instead, American coal mined in the eastern U.S. and shipped overseas goes overwhelmingly to Europe, especially the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy.

The U.S. is sending coal to Newcastle, and other English cities where the lights go on thanks to power plants fired by the American imports. British coal consumption for electricity rose about 50% in the third quarter of 2012 compared with 2011, as power producers there found coal cheaper than natural gas..

“The gas plant has simply been pushed off the grid by coal plant [in Europe], and that’s most marked in the U.K.,” said Nigel Yaxley, the managing director of the Association of U.K. Coal Importers, a trade group.

The rise in American coal exports is yet another side effect of the shale-gas revolution in the U.S., itself a result of advances in drilling techniques.

The glut of cheap natural gas has knocked coal off its dominant perch as a source of fuel for U.S. power plants. Tougher environmental rules are also squeezing coal mining in the U.S., and President Barack Obama’s inaugural address hinted at more greenhouse-gas regulation to come.

U.S. coal is finding a ready market in countries where natural gas is three to five times more expensive.

So President Obama’s attempt to “green” America is making Europe dirtier? The rest here.

Via the WSJ:

President Barack Obama in next week’s State of the Union speech will lay out a renewed effort to combat climate change that is expected to include using his authority to curb emissions from existing power plants, people who have talked to the administration about its plans said

The action, building on a pledge in the second inaugural address, fits within Mr. Obama’s larger strategy of making full use of his executive authority in areas where Congress is putting up obstacles to his agenda.

The speech, to be delivered Tuesday, isn’t finished.

Mr. Obama is likely to signal he wants to move beyond proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules on emissions from new power plants and tackle existing coal-fired plants, people familiar with the administration’s plans said.

The EPA has prepared rules for existing plants to minimize pollution from particulate matter, mercury and other toxins. But this would be the first time the agency regulates existing plants to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases scientists believe contribute to global warming.

“You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants,” one person familiar with the matter said. “How he talks about it in the State of the Union could be anything from, ‘We’ve taken important steps and we need to take more,’ to ‘We need to make more [progress] and the next one on the chopping block is existing sources’ ” of carbon emissions.

The rest here.

Entergy, meet BP.

The Superdome blackout reveals another energy company that, while preening to the public about its green morals, forgot its core business. Just as no one will remember BP’s pre-Deep Horizon green rebranding of itself as “Beyond Petroleum,” so will no one remember that — before its disastrous, prime-time, Superdome blackout — New Orleans utility Entergy was billing its Super Bowl efforts as a new benchmark for green sustainability.

Green? Now the only color associated with Entergy is a black eye.

The Super Bowl’s “a wonderful platform to bring people together to think about how our actions as individuals matter, and what we can do about climate change,” Patty Riddlebarger, director of corporate social responsibility (we’re not making this up) for Entergy, told National Geographic. She bragged about “protective and energy-saving features” from improved rainwater control to 26,000 LED lights to buying carbon credits.

Too bad they didn’t buy better power lines.

The Associated Press reports that the utility neglected decaying infrastructure coming into the stadium — despite a memo sent months before the big game warning of “a chance of failure” due to “concerns regarding the reliability of the Dome service from Entergy’s connection point to the Dome.”

Oh. Though the blackout’s cause is still under investigation, Entergy’s first priority was clearly not lighting the game.

Rewind to the 2010 BP oil spill and an oil company obsessed with image over substance. Hidden behind BP’s politically correct PR blitz was a corporation that was one of the industry’s worst in offshore-oil-drilling safety.

“BP got distracted from its core businesses and spent its energies getting into solar ventures and carbon-trading schemes, and otherwise losing the plot of an energy company. The absurd re-branding to ‘Beyond Petroleum’ speaks volumes,” reported the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner on Planet Gore after the Gulf disaster.

Allen Hershkowitz of the left-wing Natural Resources Defense Council said the NFL’s teaming with his group has “the potential to become one of the most important collaborations in the history of the environmental movement.”

Make that one of the most embarrassing collaborations.

NRO contributor Iain Murray and Geoffrey McLatchey write in Forbes on the president’s protectionist policies to protect “green” industry in America. The opener:

Trade wars benefit nobody, but we may need to brace for one soon. This month, China is set to decide on whether to place a tariff on U.S. chemical imports—specifically polysilicon—used in the solar cell manufacturing process. Chinese polysilicon producers accuse the U.S. of dumping said chemicals onto the Chinese market. If the Chinese do impose a tariff, American polysilicon producers will lose access to a significant market while the cost of solar panels will rise significantly everywhere—making everyone a loser. Yet this bad outcome is likely because the Obama administration has already fired shots in what could become the world’s first “green” trade war.

The Department of Commerce fired those shots last October, when it levied a 31 percent tariff on Chinese solar panel imports, supposedly as a “retaliatory antidumping measure” against “unfair” government subsidies to Chinese manufacturers that subsequently dumped their product onto the U.S. market.

Of course, “unfair” is a relative term. In 2010, U.S. officials reported that China spent $30 billion on subsidies to solar energy, which led President Obama to accuse China of “questionable competitive practices.” Yet his administration spent $60 billion in domestic renewable energy subsidies in 2010. Currently, it offers a 30 percent tax credit for any business investing in solar energy and a renewable energy grant equal to that 30 percent to businesses purchasing solar power systems.

The rest here.

Sí se puede! Washington Post:

Mexico’s 19th-century leaders spent lavishly to bring the railroad to their young republic, eager to show the world that they were building a modern, technologically advanced nation.

More than 100 years and a few upheavals later, with Mexico’s economy barreling forward but its pride in need of a boost, new President Enrique Peña Nieto has outlined a grand vision to showcase the country’s renewed prosperity and engineering might.

He’ll make the trains run again.

Peña Nieto surprised many at his Dec. 1 inauguration when he announced a multibillion-dollar plan to restore passenger rail service in Mexico, nearly 15 years after his own Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) finished dismantling it.

His proposals start with the completion of a rail line across the Yucatan Peninsula linking the colonial city of Merida to the beach resorts of the Mayan Riviera. As soon as next year, cruise ship passengers and sunburned college kids may be swilling cold beers in air-conditioned cars while the scenery zips by at 110 mph, stopping at archaeological sites and jungle lodges.

Far more ambitious will be a $4.5 billion high-speed line between Mexico City and Queretaro, the booming manufacturing and aerospace hub 120 miles northwest of the capital. Long-term plans would extend the route to Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, eventually filling sleek rail cars with business executives, tourists and families freed up from the country’s clogged highways.

The rest here.

Via National Geographic:

When the Ravens and 49ers face off Sunday in Super Bowl XLVII, it will be in a city—and stadium—that have spent more than six years battling back from natural and ecological disaster.

So it’s no surprise that New Orleans aims to set a new mark for environmental sustainability in its ninth turn at hosting the NFL’s marquee event, reflecting a broader green movement that is changing the look of stadiums and attitudes throughout the sports world.

“It’s a wonderful platform to bring people together to think about how our actions as individuals matter, and what we can do about climate change,” says Patty Riddlebarger, director of corporate social responsibility for the Gulf Coast energy company Entergy. She has chaired the New Orleans Host Committee’s environmental effort over the past two years.

Riddlebarger notes that much of the world holds a lingering image of the Superdome far different from the renovated stadium that will showcase the game. After a $336 million restoration, the “refuge of last resort” for 30,000 people during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 is now buttressed with protective and energy-saving features. The stadium’s outer wall is a specially designed double barrier system with improved insulation and rainwater control. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome, as it is now known, is ringed with 26,000 LED lights, covering two million square feet and supported by five miles of copper wiring, but which draw only ten kilowatts of electricity—as much as a small home. The stadium stands as an example for “not just rebuilding what was there before, but making it more environmentally sound,” Riddlebarger says.

The rest here.

Via National Geographic:

When the Ravens and 49ers face off Sunday in Super Bowl XLVII, it will be in a city—and stadium—that have spent more than six years battling back from natural and ecological disaster.

So it’s no surprise that New Orleans aims to set a new mark for environmental sustainability in its ninth turn at hosting the NFL’s marquee event, reflecting a broader green movement that is changing the look of stadiums and attitudes throughout the sports world.

“It’s a wonderful platform to bring people together to think about how our actions as individuals matter, and what we can do about climate change,” says Patty Riddlebarger, director of corporate social responsibility for the Gulf Coast energy company Entergy. She has chaired the New Orleans Host Committee’s environmental effort over the past two years.

Riddlebarger notes that much of the world holds a lingering image of the Superdome far different from the renovated stadium that will showcase the game. After a $336 million restoration, the “refuge of last resort” for 30,000 people during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 is now buttressed with protective and energy-saving features. The stadium’s outer wall is a specially designed double barrier system with improved insulation and rainwater control. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome, as it is now known, is ringed with 26,000 LED lights, covering two million square feet and supported by five miles of copper wiring, but which draw only ten kilowatts of electricity—as much as a small home. The stadium stands as an example for “not just rebuilding what was there before, but making it more environmentally sound,” Riddlebarger says.

The rest here.

AEI: The amazing increase in Texas oil – output has doubled over the last three years and completely reversed a 22-year decline

This shouldn’t be surprising, however. Oil prices have been high over the past three years making it profitable to pump from older wells.

Poof: Russian rocket carrying U.S. satellite plunges into Pacific Ocean 40 seconds after launch.

Details here.

The Hollywood Reporter says Stewart “grills” Al Gore. It’s not quite a grilling, but Gore’s defense of Qatar and Al Jazeera is quite amusing as Stewart keeps coming back to the sale.

Here’s a good interview of NRO correspondent Robert Zubrin by Ezra Levant of Canada’s Sun News on the Left’s deindustrialization movement, which promises to save the planet, even if it winds up killing millions of the poor. 

Al Gore visited NBC’s Today show this morning and was challenged by Matt Lauer to defend selling out to Al Jazeera, which was financially backed by Qatar’s oil and gas money. Gore refused to acknowledge any hypocrisy, however. Via the Washington Post:

“Today” displayed a quote from Gore’s new book “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.” It reads, “Virtually every news and political commentary program on television is sponsored in part by oil, coal and gas companies…” So Lauer asks Gore if his sale of Current TV to a network owned by the emir of an oil-earnings-fueled Middle East country (Qatar) doesn’t smack of a contradiction. To which Gore had a lame response. “I certainly understand that criticism. I disagree with it. Because I think Al Jazeera has obviously long since established itself as a really distinguished and effective news gathering organization. And by the way, its climate coverage has been far more extensive and of high quality than any…”Lauer came back at him, citing possible hypocrisy. Gore essentially repeated his first response.

To be fair, Qatar did host the last UN conference to discuss climate change in Doha. A conference that Bjørn Lomborg writes was a failure:

PRAGUE – The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countries pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000; the OECD countries fell short by almost 9%. The Kyoto Protocol from 1998 has almost entirely failed. And the effort intended to save the world in Copenhagen in 2009 collapsed spectacularly.

Ironically, as Lomborg points out, Doha hosted talks on global free trade 11 years ago and it’s free trade that would alleviate poverty, not money on more failed climate ideas:

Really? Climate policies so far have proven to be extremely costly ways of helping very little – and very far in the future. This is especially true for the world’s poor. Maybe we should start thinking about the other Doha negotiation that started 11 years ago, on global free trade, which could help the world’s poor many thousands of times more.

Models from the World Bank show that even the least ambitious agreement to liberalize trade further and reduce agricultural subsidies would generate substantial benefits. The classic argument for free trade holds that specialization and exchange benefits everyone, because goods are produced where they are produced best. The Bank’s models show that this so-called static benefit could increase annual global GDP by several hundred billion dollars by the end of the decade, with perhaps $50 billion accruing to developing countries. Toward the end of the century, the annual benefit would reach $1.5 trillion, with half going to the developing world.

But, over the last two decades, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that this is only a small part of the argument. History shows that open economies grow faster. Examples include South Korea since 1965, Chile since 1974, and India since 1991; all recorded markedly higher growth rates after liberalization.

You know, the same type of open economy enjoyed by Al Gore when he sold his cable channel and made $100 million. 

From today’s New York Post:

No murders in NYC over 9 days amid frigid temps

Thank you, global warming!

Telegraph:

Trillions of dollars worth of oil found in Australian outback

Up to 233 billion barrels of oil has been discovered in the Australian outback that could be worth trillions of dollars, in a find that could turn the region into a new Saudi Arabia.

The discovery in central Australia was reported by Linc Energy to the stock exchange and was based on two consultants reports, though it is not yet known how commercially viable it will be to access the oil.

The reports estimated the company’s 16 million acres of land in the Arckaringa Basin in South Australia contain between 133 billion and 233 billion barrels of shale oil trapped in the region’s rocks.

It is likely however that just 3.5 billion barrels, worth almost $359 billion (£227 billion) at today’s oil price, will be able to be recovered.

The find was likened to the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale oil projects in the US, which have resulted in massive outflows and have led to predictions that the US could overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer as soon as this year.

Peter Bond, Linc Energy’s chief executive, said the find could transform the world’s oil industry but noted that it would cost about £200 million to enable production in the area.

More to come on how much it will cost to get the oil, but the takeaway is that the more we look for oil, the more we find. This 2005 op-ed from the Manhattan Institute’s Peter Huber and Mark Mills is a great read arguing the problem with oil isn’t that we don’t have enough, it’s that the oil in really, really bad places is so cheap to pump and can make the economics of oil in really, really good places too expensive to consider.