On the same day the Obama Administration put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline, two engineering contracts totaling $12.2 billion were awarded to two U.S. companies for work in the Alberta oil sands. One included a $750 million contract to a Chicago-based company for work on Exxon’s huge Kearl Oil Sands project, one of [...]
There are basically two ways to cut carbon emissions, and neither one of them involves global climate change summits like the one just held in Cancún, Mexico. The way I see it, you can either price carbon, or you can restrict growth. As they did for the previous meeting in Copenhagen, some 200 of the [...]
Just because the Waxman-Markey bill is roadkill on the Senate floor doesn’t mean the US doesn’t already pay a heavy price for its carbon emissions. If you doubt that, try getting your local power utility to build a new coal-fired generating station. Between 2006 and 2009, applications for 83 new coal plants were either turned [...]
Greening our economy isn’t just about what we produce—it’s also about what we consume. Sending smokestack industries off to distant shores in search of cheap labor markets to make the things we consume may lessen the carbon footprint of our own economies, but it sure doesn’t do much for the global footprint. And since there [...]
It wasn’t sheer coincidence that last year marked two pivotal events in the world’s vehicle industry. In 2009, China became the largest car market in the world, while in the same year there were four million fewer vehicles on the road in the United States. In a world where the supply of economically viable oil [...]
With meetings on an international climate-change deal in Copenhagen just around the corner, it’s time to get real about carbon emissions. While it was emissions from the old carbon reprobates like North America and Europe that took us from 280 to 390 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere, it will be the smokestacks [...]