Obama’s Energy Agenda Under Assault in Congress

By Doug McKelway,

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In May, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced a new focus described by National Public Radio as "turning transportation policy on its head." Lahood's declaration: that pedestrians and bicyclists should be treated as equals with drivers and that more federal dollars should be devoted to walking and cycling projects. One wonders how his remarks might have been received in Beijing, where the opposite is happening, the ubiquitous bicycle is giving way to the automobile in that country's headlong thrust towards 21st Century industrialization and increased competition with the United States. More...

European commission extends carbon market freeze indefinitely

By Leigh Phillips, UK Guardian Countries must prove their systems are protected against theft of credits by hackers The European commission's emergency suspension last week of trading in carbon allowances to put a halt to rampant theft of credits by hackers has been extended indefinitely until countries can prove their systems are protected from further fraud. While the suspension had been expected to end last night, Brussels now says that the freeze in trades had been imposed to give the commission executive some breathing space to figure out what to do.

Austerity pulling plug on Europe's green subsidies

By Eric Reguly, Globe and Mail The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates. But the real victims are the investors who bought into the dream of endless, clean energy financed by the taxpayer. They forgot that governments often change their minds. Spain is famous for its housing bubble, whose bursting drove the national unemployment rate to 20 per cent-plus. Less well known is the renewable energy bubble, inflated by a government bent on shaking down the taxpayer to subsidize clean energy – a social program disguised as a politically correct industrial program. It worked. Sunny Spain became the world’s top solar power producer. Since 2002, about €23-billion has been invested in Spain’s photovoltaic (PV) industry, which sucked up €2.7-billion in subsidies in 2009 alone, or more than 40 per cent of the freebies doled out to the country’s entire renewables sector.