Global Warming, Energy
Environment, Science

Wyoming lawmakers want state regulation of greenhouse gases.

The Billings Gazette reports:

North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources has announced the oil production numbers for 2011 and the results are pretty stunning. Oil production in North Dakota jumped by 55 percent from December 2010 to December 2011. Total oil production for 2011 was 35 percent higher than 2010.

It was good news that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation’s first nuclear power plants on February 9th, clearing the way for the construction of two reactors by Southern Company at its Plant Vogtle site near Atlanta, Georgia. The bad news is that these are the first new nuclear plants since 1978!

In a nation with a growing population and increasing need for electricity to power homes and businesses, it is nothing less than insane to not include nuclear energy in the mix of providers. Environmentalists immediately attacked the announcement using the usual scare campaigns.

Anti-energy environmental groups, ensconced in Washington, DC, have a vastly different agenda from the one embraced by the great majority of consumers, voters, and taxpayers in North America.

Analysis of UK wind farms shows that the 15 biggest owners will between them receive almost £850 million in subsidies that are added on to household electricity bills. It comes after the disclosure last week that 101 Tory backbench MPs had written a letter to David Cameron demanding he slash the subsidies. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) expects the total consumer subsidy paid out by 2030 to amount to a staggering £130 billion.—Robert Mendick, and Edward Malnick, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 February 2012

Andrew Montford provides a straightforward and unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of The Royal Society but of science itself, wherein the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority.—Richard Lindzen (MIT), Foreword to Andrew Montford’s Nullius in Verba: The Royal Society and Climate Change

Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, holds degrees in economics and finance from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Coming Clean—Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal”,  published in 2008 by the Sierra Club.

Preliminary reports from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook” (which will be fully published in April) suggest that any carbon crisis may not be quite as imminent as thought. Not so long ago, the EIA predicted [US] carbon emissions levels would rise by 37 percent between 2005 and 2025. The EIA — get this – now thinks that [US] CO2 emissions in 2025 will be 6 percent lower than they were in 2005. The difference between 37 percent growth and 6 percent decline is 43 percent. That is about the level of accuracy you could expect from a blind monkey throwing darts at a wall.—Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 3 February 2012

Chemical & Engineering News

Consumers who remember laundry detergents from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are about to get that déjà vu feeling — and younger people quite a surprise — as detergent manufacturers once again try a major repackaging of their products. Laundry capsules that contain single doses of detergent and take up less space than conventional detergents are set to make a comeback. That’s the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

Journal of Proteome Research

Some of the nastiest smelling creatures on Earth have skin that produces the greatest known variety of anti-bacterial substances that hold promise for becoming new weapons in the battle against antibiotic-resistant infections, scientists are reporting. Their research on amphibians so smelly (like rotten fish, for instance) that scientists term them “odorous frogs” appears in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research.