Heroic humans in fossil-fueled motorboat save dolphins dying from lack of global warming?

Using a small motorboat, the fishermen towed one dolphin with rope out to a wider patch of open water, albeit one which is still surrounded by ice.

Shock: I agree with an entire sentence written by Joe Romm

If you want to find the best journalism now on climate — the most science-based, the most fact-based, the most relevant to your lives and the lives of your children and the people you care about and indeed all of humanity — you must go to the web, specifically the blogosphere.

The dangers of letting math-challenged politicians set US energy policy: yet another exhibit

First, don’t look to the federal Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 for guidance. That law calls for fuel wholesalers to use 1 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2013.

“There is no way at all that will happen,” says Ron Oster, an analyst at Broadpoint Amtech who tracks the emerging biofuels sector. The BP-Verenium facility in Florida will likely be the first–or second–full-sized next-gen biofuels refinery built in the U.S. It will churn out 36 million gallons a year of cellulosic ethanol – and it won’t produce the first gallon until 2012. To hit the 1 billion mark would require industry to build another 28 refineries of the same size.

Good luck. Credit and debt markets remain frozen. The technology remains new and untested, leading the industry to move slowly. That target simply won’t be hit, which will trigger a government subsidy creating a $3 per gallon floor for cellulosic ethanol.

The same law calls for 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in the U.S. transportation fuel mix by 2022. To get there, the industry would need to build 444 refineries the size of the BP-Verenium collaboration. These biofuels refineries can’t get too big because then they would outgrow their feedstock supply.

To put that in perspective, there are fewer than 150 fossil fuel refineries in the U.S. At least the landscape would be familiar—the U.S. Gulf Coast offers a longer growing season ideal for sugar cane, sorghum, and miscanthus.

What about the economics? The BP-Verenium facility will cost between $250 million and $300 million to build and create 140 fulltime jobs in the refinery and farm. That’s pretty pricey – about $7 to $8 to build each gallon of capacity, more than three times the cost of ethanol refineries.It will also take 20,000 acres to grow enough plants to turn out 36 million gallons of ethanol.

If the BP-Verednium refinery serves as a template—and it’s likely costs will fall and yields will rise over time—the industry would create 50,000 jobs and sprawl across 13,600 square miles. That’s not far shy of two New Jerseys covered in grass. Oh yeah, and it’ll cost somewhere around $100 billion to build it all.