Editorial: Wind, energy don’t need fed [National Wind Watch]

If, as Mr. Pickens claims, wind power is feasible for generating electricity, and natural gas is better than gasoline for trucks, the market will figure it out. From a utilitarian perspective, the market can be counted on to learn what works. From a moral standpoint, freely made choices coerce and abuse no one. That seems much more to resemble, “everything that’s American.”

Urbanization raises the heat in Orange County, CA « Watts Up With That?

Switch to windpower could add £6 billion a year to fuel bills - Times Online

The switch to windpower could see £6 billion a year added to the nation’s power bills by 2020 - equivalent to around £250 per household, the government’s own figures have revealed.

The money would be used to support a system of lucrative subsidies to the power companies that build and operate wind turbines.

It would also support the installation of 7,000 new wind turbines. At current prices it means each turbine could generate more profit from subsidy than from the sale of the power generated.

Ross Gelbspan: $350 billion for 350 ppm « It’s Getting Hot In Here

It will take an investment of about $350 billion a year (for five to 10 years) to achieve that solution through the most effective, direct and ultimately prosperous route possible – a coordinate global public works program to rewire the world with clean energy.

Forget carbon capture and storage. That is a mesmerizing fantasy, based on unproven and potentially catastrophic technology, to allow us to continue to burn coal. From a more cynical viewpoint, carbon sequestration represents a full-employment act for companies like Bechtel, Halliburton and, of course, Peabody coal.

Forget schemes like “cap and trade.” Trading may represent a starting point, but it is incapable of propelling a global energy transition. For too many people, “cap and trade” reflects a misplaced faith in the power of markets. “Market-based” mechanisms, after all, have enriched the global few at the expense of the global many. An unquestioning belief in the omnipotence of markets, moreover, represents an abdication of will and responsibility. We can not solve global warming through the free play of markets. We need to take control of an economic system that is driven by the dynamic of profit-maximization – not by environmental protection or an ethic of global social responsibility.

What nature requires to preserve a stable environment is a direct investment in non-carbon, non-nuclear energy sources – in wind and solar and tidal and ocean-current power, in small scale hydro-power and, ultimately, in a new hydrogen economy.