Whenever prices at the gas pump soar, President Obama's popularity takes a hit, he suggested at a private fundraising event -- and which is backed up by a recent poll. House Speaker John Boehner argued high gas prices could even cost Obama the 2012 election.
Obama argued the long term solution is clean energy, but to try to help in the shorter term, though, the administration launched two new efforts. The Justice Department will conduct a probe into speculation in oil trading, to see if it is inflating oil prices, as Obama has claimed before. Also, a new federal program will aid homeowners in getting loans to pay for improvements that boost energy efficiency. "We're making it easier for American homeowners to save money by saving energy," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.
A "Crazy and Unsustainable" Policy
With the 2012 presidential elections approaching, some Republican hopefuls have lit into Obama's approach to energy. To help with high oil prices, last week Donald Trump supports Libyan intervention if the U.S. can take their oil. This week, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty called for opening drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as well as more offshore wells, while saying Obama "sat on his hands" regarding drilling in America.
Despite calls to boost domestic fossil fuel production, "it is simply crazy and unsustainable to continue to subsidize the oil-and-gas companies when we need to reduce our deficit and invest elsewhere," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Several major oil-and-gas companies should report significant profit, according to the Associated Press.
Since the 2009 G20 meeting, Obama has been pushing for an end to fossil fuel subsidies around the world. Obama may be gaining traction on this issue, with Speaker Boehner saying oil companies "ought to be paying their fair share" of taxes.
Who Resurrected the Electric Car?
Electric cars have been resurrected, with the maker of the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car to film a follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car.
While electric cars are still a minuscule slice of the auto market, the market continues to shift in larger ways, according to a new report. As the economy has recovered somewhat from the Great Recession, sales of most kinds of cars have risen. But sales of small cars, hybrids, and diesels (which are often fuel efficient) are growing much faster than car sales as a whole. Compared to the first quarter last year, this year sales jumped roughly 25 to 45 percent for various classes of more efficient cars, but rose only 7 percent for SUVs.
Western Water Woes to Deepen
Water supplies in the Western U.S. will only get tighter as climate change worsens, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which billed it as "the first consistent and coordinated assessment of risks to future water supplies across eight major ... river basins," including the Colorado, Rio Grande and San Joaquin. Flows in these three basins, the government report said, are likely to decline by 8 to 14 percent by 2050 -- a time frame in which future warming is largely already set by past emissions. In California, however, there's large uncertainty about the impacts, making planning all the more difficult.
When it comes to moisture-loving fungi, climate change is already changing landscapes. Truffle-hunting dogs have turned up troves of the valuable fungi in Germany, where they were never known to exist before, a new study reports. Although the study was on expensive edible fungi, the findings could have much wider implications. "Without fungi, plants don't work," the study leader, a fungal ecologist, told Wired Science. "We know climates are changing and that fungal habitats are shifting. What we're not certain about are the effects."
Nuclear Power Protests Mark Chernobyl Anniversary
With progress slow on controlling Japan's damaged nuclear power plants, farmers from the area protested against nuclear power, and thousands protested in France and Germany against nukes in their countries.
Meanwhile, NRG Energy announced it is pulling the plug on a nuclear power plant it was building in Texas.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
Realizing this, Obama's plan to put more EVs on the road may actually be a good strategy. If electric cars actually achieve a market share, oil companies may actually have to compete for customers for the first time ever.
And the way to keep customers in the face of credible competition is to lower prices.
That's right, oil companies may actually have to cut into those record profits to give you lower prices on gasoline.
That's how EVs on the road help everybody, even if you never want to drive one.
That's because corn ethanol is not energy efficient. It takes about as much energy to make corn ethanol as you get out of burning it. That means it is not really a *source* of energy, but just a lot of work to turn one kind of energy (oil and natural gas) into another kind of energy (corn ethanol).
Here's a link to a research article that explains this a bit, pointing out that corn ethanol doesn't give much of any return on the energy put into making it:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j458318434015735/
And here's a primer on "energy return on investment"—a way of analyzing how much energy you get out of drilling oil fields, building solar panels, or growing corn ethanol:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ten_fundamental_principles_of_net_energy
However, if everyone switched over to CNG, we'd use up the available natural gas much faster, and you can be sure the price would go up a lot. T. Boone Pickens is pushing right now to switch lots of vehicles over to natural gas, so enjoy your cheap driving while it lasts. Natural gas may not stay so cheap for long.
Bursting the bubble might be $30/barrel diesel from a biofuel breakthrough. The same process leads to much cheaper gas.
See Moving Beyond Oil at www.aesopinstitute.org for a bit more information.
Most future cars will some day be electric. They will recharge without the need to plug-in.
When suitably parked, they can sell substantial electric power to local utilities. Perhaps enough to pay for the vehicle.
See Green Light on the same website where a few other posts may also prove of interest.
An initiative to rapidly move to 24/7 validation, development and production of a few highly improbable Black Swan energy breakthroughs, can be accomplished by a few entrepreneurs, backed by sufficient adventure capital.
A small flock of Black Swans will then emerge rapidly enough to change the energy arena.
As these seemingly impossible revolutionary energy technologies enter the market, the leaders in the White House and Congress might eventually wise-up and follow.
Imagine an auto industry that can sell cars that use no fuel and pay for themselves.
Jobs will multiply like rabbits. And they will be well paid.
This is the next American revolution.
I personally think that speculation can, at times, inflate the price somewhat. But the run-up in prices over the past 10 years—when oil went from about $20 a barrel to now about $120 a barrel—is not mainly due to speculators. It's due to oil production hitting many limits—and possibly the world facing peak oil right now.
Check out my article for National Geographic News, on the International Energy Agency's big report from last year:
Has the World Already Passed “Peak Oil”?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2010/11/101109-peak-oil-iea-world-energy-outlook/