Earth Track Blog

Spineless subsidies part 1: Ethanol Ethanol blenders credit moves forward towards extension at current rates in the Senate. Even more ludicrous since even without the excise tax credit subsidy we are still forced to buy the stuff at above market prices under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard...

Tomorrow's event (November 30th), titled Department of Energy Loan Guarantees: Should Taxpayers Bear the Risks for the Energy Sector with Loan Guarantees? A Conservative Take, looks to be an interesting one tomorrow. The discussion brings together panelists from the Heritage Foundation, the National...

Another study ( summary, full report) indicating that biofuel mandates (this time in the EU) will result in extra land conversion, and associated large emissions of greenhouse gases. The analysis, by the Institute for European Environmental Policy, found that between 4.1 and 6.9 million hectares of...

A wide range of groups on the right and the left properly linking subsidized expansion of the civilian nuclear power sector with what happens on the nuclear proliferation front in this letter to President Obama. Energy security, after all, has many dimensions. It is not only about oil imports.

Faced with expiration of the ethanol blender's credit in only a few months, the ethanol lobby has been working the halls Congress to fashion together a fallback mix of subsidies -- even though mandates to use ethanol in vehicles remains in force. Taxpayers for Common Sense summarizes the state of...

According to Bloomberg, the Obama administration will momentarily announce that current blend limits of 10 percent on ethanol in gasoline will be increased to 15 percent (E-15). Research has been ongoing on the impact of higher blends on the functioning of vehicles not built to handle higher blends...

Constellation Energy has announced it will not be continuing its effort to build a third nuclear reactor at its Calvert Cliffs site in Maryland. I looked at the structure of this project, and the associated subsidies, in detail last year in this paper for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center...

Ryan Lizza has a detailed and interesting look at the failure of the United States to pass climate change legislation. A combination of strategic gaffes (not necessarily by the bill's sponsors), political pressures, external events such as the Gulf oil spill, and the inevitable political...

Clandestine nuclear programs have been at the heart of many difficult international conflicts, and that number seems likely to grow. Although the overlap in skills, technologies, and equipment between civilian and military programs is both substantial and well-recognized, the push for the expansion...

Information technology is an increasingly important element of nearly all of our energy infrastructure. The software that controls, optimizes, and links this equipment to achieve our energy production and demand management objectives has often been flagged as a vulnerability. There have been...

Subsidy measurement is a pre-requisite to any effective program of subsidy reform, whether through the WTO, the G20, or domestic policy initiatives. Too often, policy makers take accurate and comprehensive subsidy measurement as a given. It isn't. In fact, making subsidies difficult to measure can...

Congratulations to the Marcus Peacock's team at Subsidyscope (and, to Kevin Webb's group at the Sunlight Foundation -- they have also played an instrumental role), for the launch of their energy subsidy module yesterday. The energy sector is the fourth module to be completed by Subsidyscope. Earlier...

Keith Schneider at Circle of Blue, wrote a very interesting summary of a Sandia National Laboratory report on water consumption for energy production that has been, shall we say, "held up" within DOE despite 22 rounds of revisions. The report is a more detailed follow-up of an earlier Sandia Report...

So is the logic of recycling uranium as straightforward as that for recycling an aluminum can? Philosophy Professor Benham Taebi at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has argued in a recent International Herald Tribune op-ed that reprocessing is the way to go: But what is most...

EnSol, a Norwegian company, is developing a spray-on photovoltaic coating for existing structures. While it will no doubt be some time before this is commercialized, the story is a good reminder that important energy break-throughs may come from unexpected places. Relying on government officials to...

A few useful resources on the potential links between civilian nuclear power and proliferation from NPEC. Here's a couple of recent postings by Henry Sokolski on the technology sharing agreements with Vietnam and UAE. A more detailed exposition of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty can be found...

It is hard to imagine the executives of a public company extending an $8.3 billion line of credit to a risky new venture, and then be unwilling to provide any detail to shareholders on how they evaluated the benefits and risks of the deal, and what they were expecting to get paid for taking on that...

Professor Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School, with coauthor Richard Newell, is publishing a new book, Accelerating Innovation in Energy: Insights from Multiple Sectors. I like is that her background is in innovation and structural transformation, not energy -- a refreshing break from some...

The internet has been aflutter with the findings by New Energy Finance that conventional fuels receive way more in subsidies than does renewable energy. The press coverage generally refers to this short summary. Today it was picked up in Andrew Revkin's influential dot Earth blog. Turns out that New...

I wanted to call attention to an important study released last month by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, prepared for the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. Authored by a study team led by my former colleague Tom Walker, the analysis delves in to the many complicated elements...