By Sara Reardon 15 August 2012 As the United States’ extended heat wave and drought threaten to raise global food prices, energy production is also feeling the pressure. Across the nation, power plants are becoming overheated and shutting down or running at lower capacity; drilling operations struggle to get the water they need, and crops […]
[cf. Earth’s greatest mass extinction caused by coal: study] By Robert Bryce27 July 2012 Standing in the dispatch office of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine near Gillette, Wyo., Scott Durgin pointed at a flat-panel display. The regional vice president for Peabody Energy smiled. The most productive coal mine in the world was on target. Since […]
By Bill McKibben19 July 2012 If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern […]
By PETER ALLEN 18 July 2012 Paul Schneidereit’s July 10 column “Humans’ love affair with fossil fuels won’t end anytime soon” slammed soothsayers who supposedly predicted doom because we would run out of oil. One such soothsayer was King Hubbert, a geophysicist who worked for Shell Oil and the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1956, he […]
Carbon emissions keep going up, up, and up. The CAP report spends a lot of time dwelling on the consequences of unchecked global warming — e.g., by 2030 wildfires in Western states like Montana will increase by 300 percent. But they also point out that the sort of energy security promised by API is still […]
By KELLY SLIVKA28 June 2012 Many see New York State’s six-million-acre Adirondack Park as a place of respite where you go to gulp down the cool air and hear loon calls echoing through the hills. The landscape is unmarred, wild. Human hands do not have to physically touch a place, though, to disturb it. Mercury […]
By Julie Johnsson24 June 2012 The coal-fired power industry in the U.S. is facing the biggest plunge in asset values in a decade, risking billions of dollars in pollution-control spending by utilities such as Exelon Corp. (EXC) and American Electric Power Co. (AEP) An indication of how much new emissions rules and cheaper natural gas […]
By KEITH BRADSHER22 June 2012 HONG KONG – As the Chinese economy continues to sputter, prominent corporate executives in China and Western economists say there is evidence that local and provincial officials are falsifying economic statistics to disguise the true depth of the troubles. Record-setting mountains of excess coal have accumulated at the country’s biggest […]
Today, close to 99% of the coal mined in the Powder River Basin is consumed in domestic U.S. coal markets. However, a depressed domestic market and increased foreign demand, especially from the Pacific Rim, has piqued the interest of the largest U.S. coal producers in potential export markets. Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, […]
By David Fogarty; Editing by Ed Davies3 June 2012 SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Warmer water and reduced river flows will cause more power disruptions for nuclear and coal-fired power plants in the United States and Europe in future, scientists say, and lead to a rethink on how best to cool power stations in a hotter world. […]
