Energy

No Priority for Energy

By Justin Katz | May 6, 2008 |

Michael Zey’s op-ed, yesterday, enunciates the factors indicating that the United States of America is just not that interested in developing energy independence — much less developing energy as an export industry. As the Platts report plainly states, without a growing energy supply, countries face “declining growth rates, diminished standards of living, and growing transfer…

Re: Just Say No to Ethanol

By Carroll Andrew Morse | May 2, 2008 |

On the blog of Set America Free(*), a coalition of individuals and non-profit organizations dedicated to promoting progress toward American energy security, Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror and Breaking Free of Foreign Oil, challenges the idea that ethanol production is to blame for any recent increases in food prices…

Just Say No to Ethanol

By Monique Chartier | April 28, 2008 |

From a New York Times editorial almost two months ago: The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the price of wheat…

Enervating Energy Production

By Justin Katz | January 26, 2008 |

The topic is energy production, but the implications are much broader for the cast of characters who call Rhode Island, and New England, home. Exhibit A: The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has given final state approval to a Somerset power plant to use a new technology called coal plasma gasification. State environmental officials say…

Congress’s Energy Bill: Lipstick on a Pig

By Mac Owens | December 12, 2007 |

Not too long ago, I addressed the security aspects of the pending energy legislation in the Christian Science Monitor. Today, I examine some of the economic consequences of the legislation in the ProJo. Despite the attempt to appeal to environmentalists and advocates of “fairy dust” energy sources, aka “renewable energy,” this bill, like most energy…

Energy Security vs. Energy

By Mac Owens | December 2, 2007 |

Congress is considering energy legislation that will create some very bad outcomes. One of the worst will be to make the United States less secure when it comes to access to energy. I addressed this issue Friday in the Christian Science Monitor. A longer and more detailed version of my argument is over on the…

Why We’ll Probably Never Have High-Speed Rail in New England

By Carroll Andrew Morse | November 26, 2007 |

Megan McArdle of the Asymmetrical Information blog identifies the major limitation of what’s supposed to be Rhode Island’s high-speed rail link to the rest of the Eastern seaboard…Why is America’s high-speed rail so dreadful? The Acela delivers you, at enormous added expense, to Boston one hour ahead of the regional. On the DC-to-NY run, the…

Froma Harrop’s Genius Economic Cure-All

By Justin Katz | November 17, 2007 |

And to think — as the cost of driving my work van, carting around the tools and materials of a jobsite carpenter, resumes its upswing — Froma Harrop had the solution all along: Take oil. It’s not Bush’s fault that fast-growing China and India have fired up the global demand for oil, thus boosting its…

Preliminary Rhode Island Wind Farm Planning

By Carroll Andrew Morse | November 9, 2007 |

Michael Souza of the Narragansett Times has an initial report on sites being considered for a electricity-generating wind farm for Rhode Island…Monday night’s monthly marine fisheries council meeting featured a presentation by Dan Mendelsohn of Applied Technology and Management Inc. of Newport. The topic of discussion was the possible location of offshore windmills. The company…

Re: A Misplaced Focus

By Monique Chartier | September 18, 2007 |

Justin’s post about the contaminated land in Tiverton provokes a comparison to the major complication of nuclear energy — the issue of long-term storage of spent nuclear materials — and the advisability of augmenting our generation of nuclear energy which would, naturally, increase the amount of highly toxic waste product to be dealt with. After…