Energy
I’ve been on the road for a couple of weeks, so I’m only now catching up. This piece ran in the Newport Daily News of 30 May. Of course, the title is wishful thinking. By the way, I believe gasoline prices will drop from their high point at the end of May. The last couple…
I’m all for hawkish actions by the United States Congress, but this one seems a tad strange. From the Associated Press…Decrying near-record high gasoline prices, the House voted Tuesday to allow the government to sue OPEC over oil production quotas. The White House objected, saying that might disrupt supplies and lead to even higher costs…
Isn’t California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger expressing the right basic idea about ethanol policy in this report from Reuters…California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Friday he wants markets to set policies on low carbon fuels, and called for eliminating subsidies and tariffs related to ethanol. “We need to take down the barriers we have created,” Schwarzenegger…
A Worcester Business Journal story on the expansion of the Providence & Worcester Railroad (including P&W receiving new automobiles “for the first time [in] the company’s history” for transport to New England dealerships via the port at Davisville) hides the news with the most potential long-range impact at the bottom of the page…P&W is also…
Here’s the background on the ethanol spat between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Lula da Silva going on at the South American energy summit being held this week. Brazil is a major importer of Bolivian natural gas. About a year ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales, a Hugo Chavez lackey, nationalized his country’s natural…
In addition to talking about Iraq with Dan Yorke, Congressman Langevin also talked about Speaker Pelosi’s recent botched Syrian excursion and said she was following the precepts of the Iraq Study Group report (PDF). While Langevin condemned the regimes of both Iran and Syria, he also offered that–as per the Iraq Study Group–pragmatic diplomacy was…
Well, silly me, here I thought that the Biofuel Pact that will be signed by President Bush and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva would be viewed as a good thing. Here’s what I thought would be the main storyline: President Bush sees the new agreement with Brazil on ethanol as a way to…
In the Providence Phoenix from two weeks ago, Ian Donnis quoted University of Rhode Island Political Science Chairwoman Maureen Moakley on Rhode Island’s tendency to reject development of all sorts…For too long, Moakley believes, there has been a lack of vision and an excess of parochialism on economic development: “We don’t want a port, we…
Because many estimates concerning the efficiency of ethanol-based fuels put forth in the 1970s and 1980s were based on an assumption that ethanol would be primarily derived from corn, ethanol developed a reputation that has been hard to shake for being inadequate as a gasoline replacement. However, with technological improvements in agricultural and refining techniques,…
Over the past few months, the Projo has been running an interesting series of energy-policy editorials. Today’s editorial contained a reference to a possible new way to produce gasoline that I had never heard of before…The coal in Illinois alone could make more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. And the technology to…
