SOLAR TODAY Blog

The U.S. House of Representatives has 424 seats, so it takes 218 votes to pass a bill against vigorous opposition.

On Friday evening, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, HR 2454, passed 219 to 212, with three members not voting.

Three members voted no because they said it isn't strong enough. They had the grace to wait until 218 votes were recorded in favor and the bill was sure of passage before posting their protest votes. The bill does need to be strengthened. It needs more aggressive goals for 2020, and a solar carve-out. But many of its provisions are spectacular. The building efficiency measures, for instance, are worth the price of admission and will, among other things, create millions of American jobs. 

Now it's on to the Senate, with the goal of having a meaningful law in place before the Copenhagen Climate Conference opens on Dec. 6. Only with a law in place can the Obama administration negotiate from a credible position with the world's other large carbon polluters. Without climate legislation, the United States is not a player, and the world is doomed to cook.

In the Senate, the bill will face more bitter and misinformed opposition. Democrats, who lack strong party unity on many climate-related issues, will need some Republican votes to break a filibuster. With Minnesota's Al Franken, the Democrats may hold 60 seats, but they may not have Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, who are in failing health. Byrd is from West Virginia - he or his successor may vote with coal interests anyway.

The vote-balance reality means that a Senate version will contain more compromises. Any way you look at it, we're going to get a flawed bill - in particular the 2020 goals are far too weak. But it will be a start - it will establish the principle that carbon emissions must carry a price. That's historic. We can lobby hard for stronger measures next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.

NASA's chief climatologist James Hansen was among 31 protesters arrested on Tuesday in a civil protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia.

Hansen has been outspoken about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change since 1981. He has a reputation in the scientific community for having accurately predicted climate patterns since then. Last fall Hansen calculated that a "safe" level of CO2 is 350 parts per million. Because CO2 concentrations now average 385 ppm worldwide, achieving the safe level requires rolling back emissions very sharply. Hansen says it can only be done by closing all coal-burning power plants within 20 years.

Read about Hansen's anti-coal campaign in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker. See Elizabeth Kolbert's profile "The Catastrophist," beginning on page 39.

Thomas Friedman's column in today's New York Times reiterates the very strong argument that pushing the price of oil down, down and down has the effect of destabilizing monstrous oil-exporting regimes: Iran now, Russia later, Saudi Arabia some day.  Reduce the price of oil by cutting demand for it, and democracy grows.

There's a much broader geopolitical argument, of course. Getting off fossil fuels in general pushes the price of oil down, and ought to help the EU declare independence from Russian gas. 

The problem, aside from our dependence on imported oil, is that the pace of conversion to  a post-fossil energy economy depends largely on keeping fuel prices high.

On Thursday, Congress sent to President Obama the $105 billion war funding act. It included the $1 billion "Cash for Clunkers" measure, offering up to $4,500 to auto buyers who trade in an old gas hog.

On Saturday, my neighbor had a new car.

Arthur and Fredrika, 80-somethings, are a retired long-haul trucking team. For the decade I've lived alongside them, they've pottered around town in a huge 1967 Ford Fairlane station wagon. The V8 engine idled with the kind of loping burble I associate with cabin cruisers. In neighborhood traffic, I never saw the car go faster than 25 mph. But I'll wager it got 18 mpg at that speed.

On Saturday, the baby-blue Ford was still moored in Arthur's curbside handicapped spot, but Arthur himself was seated around the corner in a brand new shiny black Volkswagen Jetta. He was studying the owner's manual and puzzling over the electronics. The Ford, he said, would be towed by the dealer in a day or two.

Good for Arthur and Fredi. They're finally out of the whale.

The bad news is that they don't get the $4,500 credit. The Ford was too old -- the program covers only cars 25 years old or less, and it won't even be available until late July. $4,500 is far more than the Ford is worth. So if it had been a 1984, and if it had lived another six weeks, they'd have been way ahead.

Toyota is about to ship several hundred of the eagerly-awaited plug-in hybrid Prius, which can reportedly go 30 miles on electric drive alone. It's for use by government, corporate and even rental fleets.

Toyota sales have slumped 14% since October's stock market crash, leading the company to cancel construction of a new Prius factory in Mississippi. But sales of the new "conventional" Prius hybrid are now booming. The company reports selling 110,000 units in May, toward its goal of 400,000 this year - about half of those are destined for the U.S. With fuel prices on the rise, the waiting list for the new car is said to stretch several months out.

So Toyota may build the Prius in the U.S. after all. But not in Mississippi. The car may be built at the New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI) plant in Fremont, Calif. NUMMI, a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors, is about to lose its Pontiac production line as that brand evaporates in the GM bankruptcy. The factory also builds the Toyota Corolla, which uses the same frame as the Prius.

With no zoning laws, Houston, Texas, grew chaotically. Residential neighborhoods are broken up by the usual strip malls but also by many oddly-placed industrial sites. The sprawling freeway system suffers from incomplete signage, so a visitor driving through makes frequent wrong turns. The freeways are the only way to get around: public transportation has been a dismissable afterthought since World War II.

I was one of those visitors on Monday and Tuesday. Flying down from Boulder, it was fun to see, among the many oil fields, a lot of wind turbines spinning in the warm wind flowing northward from the Gulf of Mexico. In town, the weather -- 98 degrees and humid -- forces people indoors to enjoy the air conditioning. Some of the huge downtown buildings feature sealed bridges vaulting across streets, for the same reason you see them in places like Edmonton and Montreal: you can walk between corporate headquarters without experiencing weather. It's just a different sort of weather.

In this oil-soaked culture, solar power and energy efficiency get short shrift. At a barbecue on Sunday evening, the host -- an oil geologist at Exxon -- explained about hurricane parties: it's when you eat everything in the fridge because when the grid goes down the food will spoil. No one has thought about solar-charged backup power. Neighbors who want back-up power buy propane-driven generators. Long before sundown, on a hot moist evening, the expensive home across the street had a couple of decorative natural-gas lanterns burning on either side of the garage door. Exxon, my host explained, has no program to develop non-fossil liquid fuels, but it has launched a carbon-sequestration research project.

Some small solar initiatives are in evidence. On Monday, a crew began installing solar modules on the support structure of the George R. Brown Convention Center. The huge building has a flat, white-painted roof covering about 56,000 square meters. If covered with PV panels, this area might produce as much as 5.5 megawatts. Right now, the roof is getting 50 kilowatts of silicon panels (20 kw donated by BP Solar) bolted to the exterior superstructure, and 50 kw of flexible plastic thin-film modules glued to the flat roof. It's a test to see how much power they'll produce, and whether they'll survive Class 3 hurricane wind and rain.

The July/August issue of The Atlantic contains a good feature article on the history of renewable energy in the U.S. since the Carter administration, and the lessons to be drawn as we launch another go at reforming the nation's energy economy.

In "Better Luck This Time," senior editor Joshua Green traces the volatile seesaw pattern of renewable American renewables to Congressional ambivalence - but also (and chiefly) to a fundamental mistake by the Carter administration. Carter sought to support renewable energy not through direct funding but through the investment tax credit. Direct funding gave us the interstate highway system, the moon landings and even the internet - all high-speed successes. For a variety of reasons, by the time Carter took office, the tax credit was a more politically palatable way to steer investment.

Green writes:

The trouble with tax credits is that in order to make use of them, you must owe taxes, and most start-ups struggling toward profitability do not. So while a company looing to build a wind or solar facility would qualify for valuable benefits, it had no means of realizing this "tax equity." The work-around was to partner with someone who did, someone large enough to finance a $500 million facility and profitable enough to incur a large tax bill. Having witnessed two decades of busts and bankruptcies [in the renewable energy sector, due to cyclical expiration of tax incentives], traditional U.S. banks wanted no part of this. European banks, going by their more positive experience [in the sector], were more comfortable funding large renewable projects, but didn't qualify for U.S. tax credits. . . .

Investment banks and hedge funds stepped in to fill the void . . . For renewable-energy companies, tax-equity deals meant life or death: the combination of credits could offset two-thirds of the capital cost of a project. Companies like Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG became an integral part - even the integral part - of the renewables industry, because the utility-scale projects they financed produce the overwhelming majority of clean energy in the United States.

This arrangement not only proved inefficient, but it tied renewable energy to the fate of Wall Street. When the investment banks crashed, so did utility-scale projects.

This report comes in from Lewis L. Smith, a semi-retired energy economist, former advisor on energy to various governors of Puerto Rico and a former director of what is now the island's Energy Affairs Administration. Smith is also a long-time ASES member.

J. P. Morgan has hired a crude-oil tanker to store fuel oil off Malta's coast, shipping sources said on Wednesday. The U.S. investment bank declined to comment. Storing any light, refined oil products in a crude oil tanker is unusual.

But one shipping source said the vessel, Front Queen, was a new very large crude carrier (VLCC) which had never had a cargo on board, meaning that its tanks were clean and able to carry refined products. The tanker can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil, the source said.

Separately, a shipping source said another new VLCC has been rented by a trading house to store fuel oil off Malta.

I wrote just 10 days ago that U.S. gas prices are likely to reach $2.50 per gallon during this summer's driving season. I was wrong. The average price for a gallon of unleaded regular reached $2.62 yesterday, up a dollar from its post-crash low last December, and the EIA says the price may peak at $2.70 in July. In economically distressed Michigan, it now costs $2.93 a gallon to drive to your next job interview.

 New York Times business reporter Clifford Krauss says the high prices are putting a damper on the economic recovery. The price of a barrel of crude oil has  doubled since December, in the face of reduced worldwide demand, baffling some analysts. Depending on whose news reporting you read, the price rise comes from increased demand in China, constrained production by OPEC, or speculator hoarding. Smart money is on the notion that the cheaply-accessible oil is all gone -- a euphemism for the idea that peak oil has come and gone.

The price of all liquid fuels will remain volatile, and the Northeast probably faces a real fuel oil issue during the coming winter. If gas does return to $4 per gallon during the next year or two -- and it will -- that will be good news for dealers trying to move efficient new cars. It will be good for the natural gas business, which produces an alternative to fuel oil, and for emerging non-food biofuels start-ups.

In signing the Kyoto agreement, the United Kingdom undertook to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 12.5% below 1990 levels by 2010.

On Friday, the British government announced that it will meet its 2010 goal. In fact, it will double up, cutting emissions 23% by the target date.

This follows last week's news that the entire European Union, on average, will meet Kyoto targets for 2010.

It's welcome news while Congress debates whether climate targets of any sort are practical, affordable or even achievable. If Britain can do it, why shouldn't we?

Your comments please.