Yet the Olkiluoto reactor will generate electricity at only ONE-FOURTH the cost of Germany's growing complex of solar installations over the lifetime of both, according to a recent study by the Breakthrough Institute.

Authors Alex Trembath, Jessica Lovering, Max Luke made a very simple calculation. They took Areva's all-in construction and operating costs and compared it to the feed-in tariffs that Germany is providing to get solar electricity on the grid. "Feed-in tariffs" are simply price supports that are paid to the producer for providing supply. Because the market price would make solar prohibitive - no one would buy it - the government pays the difference to make it economical. These costs are then absorbed by the government but eventually pushed back to taxpayers in the form of higher rates or taxes. There's no getting around economics.

The comparison, then, is this. Olkiluoto will cost $15 billion by the time it is completed and pays its operating costs over 20 years of operation. Over the same 20 years, Germans will be shelling out $130 billion for the same amount of electricity at current feed-in-tariff rates. Of course solar advocates will argue that costs are coming down and that these tariff rates will no longer be necessary, but half of Germany's solar complex is already built so that won't be affected. In addition, future cost reductions can be elusive.

Overall, the authors calculate that Germans will pay a rate of 32.4 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity while Olkiluoto customers will pay a rate of 6.9 cents - a 4-1/2 times differential. No wonder one analysis calls Germany's solar effort "An Unfolding Disaster."

TODAY'S TAKEAWAY: WILL OBAMA BE THE FOSSIL FUELS PRESIDENT?

The ironies abound as those preparing to determine President Obama's begin to size up his second term. The President came to office promising to convert our energy system to "wind, solar and soil" (meaning biofuels). He may leave office after presiding over the biggest fossil fuel bonanza since Spindletop. Ken Braun, a political consultant writing on Michigan Live, says all the President has to do is sit back and let it happen. "He tried and failed with the best "green energy" pitch he will ever get with the stimulus-fueled renewable energy rip-offs. But history and the ingenuity of American industry has bequeathed him a historic fossil fuel boom that will give the economy a big boost. If he ends his administration's hostility to oil and gas exploration on federal land and offshore, he may yet justifiably claim credit for making it grander still." In fact it might even happen if the President DOESN'T end his administration's hostility to exploration on federal lands. Who was it said I'd rather be lucky than good?

BUT WHAT IS THE NATION'S REAL ENERGY POTENTIAL?

In the Orlando Advocate, however, Harry C. Alford is the co-founder and President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce is having none of it. He thinks the President could do much more in the way of promoting new energy jobs and development. Specifically, he'd like to see some accelerated permits for the export of natural gas. "]H]ow does America get back to the days of robust natural gas production and job creation that were seen from 2005-2011? Simple. Encourage LNG exports. By increasing exports of natural gas the U.S. will create a market for excess supply. Domestic natural gas prices will remain affordable and job growth in the energy industry will continue higher. The author of SBE Council's natural gas study, economist Raymond J. Keating, explains the natural gas situation best." That's the trouble with those businessmen. They're always trying to make things better.

THINGS ARE GETTING COMPLICATED IN VERMONT

If you think California is having trouble dealing with energy, try the little boutique, nature-loving state of Vermont. Right now Vermont gets 60 percent of its electricity from the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station. Nuclear! We don't want that terrible stuff. We want to Go Green! So the state is trying to close the reactor. But now somebody has figured out that Going Green may mean covering about 40 percent of the Green Mountains with 45 story windmills on the ridgeline. Whoa, we don't want that, either. Now Vermont Gas is trying to build a pipeline that would bring Canadian gas to the central part of the state, including Middlebury College. Well, gas is good, right? Clean, efficient, low carbon? But wait a minute. Pipeline! Doesn't that have something to do with Keystone? Well, we certainly don't want that! In fact it turns out that Middlebury College is the home of Bill McKibben, the No-More-Fossil-Fuels crusader who is the principal opponent of the Keystone. So in order to be a Equal Opportunity Pipeline Opponent, McKibben has announced his opposition to the Middlebury pipeline, too. But now college officials say they need the gas for a big bio-methane project they're planning. Bio-methane, that sounds good, right? Well, it's all head-spinning. John Kingston does a great job trying to sort it all out on Platts.

IF WE DON'T HAVE PEAK OIL, CAN WE STILL HAVE CLIMATE?

Bryan Walsh, in Time, articulates what's going through a lot of enviornmentalists' heads now - damn, I miss Peak Oil! Just of years ago it looked like we were going to run out of fossil fuels and all this worry about climate change would take care of itself. Now they've found all this horrible new shale gas and tight oil and we're back to square one. Well, what are you going to do? Unless we adopt Communism and put the Boone Pickens and George Mitchells of the world in jail, they're always going to be out there finding something new. So how do we deal with climate change now? Amory Lovins may cling to the idea that wind and solar will drive fossil fuels from the marketplace but at least Walsh is willing to be realistic: " Oil is so much better at what it does-containing easily portable energy-then any currently workable substitute that it's difficult to see it the world voluntarily giving it up unless it becomes prohibitively expensive, or we see a real social shift that puts much greater value than we do now on preventing climate change. Looks like we'll have to hope for-and work for-the latter."

CAN THE ELON MUSK CHARISMA RUB OFF ON OTHER BRANDS?

Elon Musk is becoming a hot commodity on Wall Street these days. After his Tesla Model S received a rating of "The Best Car Every" from Consumer Reports, there seems like nothing that the former PayPal innovator can't do. Now people are starting to wonder if this charisma can rub off on other technologies as well. "SolarCity . . . surged 9% Thursday after announcing an agreement with Goldman Sachs thatt will finance $500 million worth of solar projects," reports CNN Money. "SolarCity is chaired by Elon Musk, the PayPal co-founder who now runs electric-car maker Tesla Motors. . . . `The short squeeze in Tesla has been spilling over into gains in SolarCity,' said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst with Raymond James. `You can call it the Elon Musk Trade.'"

HOUSTON ENERGY: SOROS STEPS IN, PICKENS GETTING OUT

Finally, if you're down in Houston keeping track of energy investment, you have to wonder which way the wind is blowing. Legendary oil investor T. Boone Pickens is cutting his Houston holdings. "The billionaire investor also sold and decreased several of his Houston energy company holdings,"reports Collin Eaton in the Houston Business Journal "BP Capital Management sold off its $10.3 million stake in Southwestern Energy Co. a $6.4 million stake in National Oilwell Varco Inc. and a $5.7 million stake in Marathon Oil Corp." But the same Collin Eaton also reports that other billionaire, George Soros, is increasing his Houston holdings. Soros Fund Management LLC, a New York-based $8.5 billion hedge fund, scooped up an $8.4 million stake in Apache Corp. , a $7.4 million stake in C&J Energy Services Inc. and a $6.5 million stake in Cameron International Corp. . He also bought a $6.5 million stake in Cheniere Energy Inc..a $16.7 million stake in Southwestern Energy Co. and a $22.5 million stake in Ultra Petroleum Corp., according to regulatory filings."  All this requirs a discerning eye.

The graph shows the number of jobs created at each of five manufacturers in the box at left. What DOE didn't do was measure these jobs against the size of the loan to the manufacturer. That is shown by the green bars. Each job at Nissan North America cost $1,1133,846 apiece. Jobs at the other manufacturers were much less costly but still averaged more than $250,000. Moreover there are other rubs. The 33,000 at Ford already existed. DOE says they were only "converted" to green jobs when the manufacturer used the loan to switch from gas-powered to electric vehicles. Also, the 2,000 jobs created at Fisker are now down the drain.

What no one asks here is how many jobs did this program create in Washington?

North Dakota, which leads the nation in job growth, wage increases, and low unemployment, owes much of its success to the shale energy boom and hydraulic fracturing advances. Meanwhile, as national unemployment hovers around 7.5 percent - more than twice the rate of North Dakota -- the federal government's policy toward energy production can only be described as a "bust."

At nearly every turn, the federal government is actively obstructing domestic energy production. For example, oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than 40 percent compared to 10 years ago. Consider the impact in light of the government's vast landholdings: Uncle Sam owns 36.6 percent of Colorado, 57.4 percent of Utah and 42.3 percent of Wyoming. Those three states happen to contain the nation's principal holdings of oil shale (not to be confused with shale oil). Unlike shale oil, which is conventional oil trapped in shale rock, oil shale is sedimentary rock that contains kerogen. Kerogen is considerably valuable because it can be processed into liquid fuels that are used as raw material for a vast array of consumer goods.

Instead of encouraging oil shale development, the Obama administration is keeping resource-rich regions in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming under lock and key. At stake is enough technically recoverable oil shale to provide American consumers with 140 years of electricity at current usage rates. While oil shale has yet to be developed in the United States, Estonia, for example, already derives 90 percent of its electricity production from this energy source. However, America will never develop its oil shale resources if the federal government continues to restrict access.

Despite untapped domestic energy supplies locked away on federal lands, the Obama administration continues to drag its feet in processing drilling applications, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. In 2006, it took 218 days on average to process an application for a permit to drill on federal lands. Since then, the Bureau of Land Management increased the complexity of the forms so much that by 2011, it took an average of 307 days to turn an application around, a 41 percent increase. "A more efficient permitting process may be an added incentive for the industry to invest in developing federal resources, which may allow for some oil and gas to come onstream sooner, but in general, the regulatory framework for developing resources on federal lands will likely remain more involved and time-consuming than that on private land," the CRS report concluded.

Expanding energy production on federal lands would have an enormous impact on the American economy, according to an independent study published by the Institute for Energy Research (IER). The resulting broad-based economic stimulus would include a $127 billion annual boost in GDP for the next seven years; an increase of 552,000 jobs annually for the next seven years; wage hikes of $32 billion for each of the next seven years and $115 billion annually between seven and thirty years. Additionally, our cash-strapped federal government would realize $24 billion in annual revenue over the next seven years, and $86 billion annually thereafter. State and local governments would also benefit from $10.3 billion additional annual revenues over the next seven years, and $35.5 billion annually thereafter.

As the USGS reassessment demonstrates, new energy discoveries and technological advancements are happening at a rapid pace. North America has 1.79 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves, according to the North American Energy Inventory released by IER in December 2011. That's enough to fill the tank of every passenger car in the United States for the next 430 years! The survey also estimated 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas resources, enough to heat every home for the next 575 winters at current usage rates. Of course, these estimates were published well before the new USGS reassessments. America's true energy supply is undoubtedly even more robust, providing further certainty that domestic resources can meet America's energy needs for years to come.

America continues to struggle amid sluggish growth, staggering budget deficits, and the Obama administration's desire to ensure that sequester cuts inflict maximum harm. North Dakota, with plenty of high-paying jobs and a $1.6 billion budget surplus, serves as a blueprint for rejuvenating the American economy. North Dakota's pro-growth energy policies are a testament to the curative power of unlocking access to domestic energy resources.

Thomas J. Pyle is the President of the Institute for Energy Research.

TODAY'S TAKEAWAY: WHAT'S THAT PRICE-FIXING SCANDAL ALL ABOUT?

The European Union is all abuzz over the story that major oil companies may have been submitting inaccurate prices to Platts in compiling the daily Market on Close (MOC) pricing process. Bureaucrats are talking of another LIBOR scandal and British Prime Minister David Cameron is threatening jail sentences for oil company executives. Shell and BP, both European countries, are particular targets. You can see what's going on here. It's the annual beat-up-on-the-oil-companies festival. The implication is that oil companies have been inflating prices at the pump and politicians are riding to the rescue. In fact, the possibility of manipulating oil prices are very, very slim. As ABC News writes in a level-headed analysis: "[O]il prices are affected by multiple factors that affect traders' willingness to buy oil products. They include indicators on the state of the global economy; conflict in the Mideast, where a lot of crude is produced; the strength of the dollar, which is used to trade oil products; and hurricanes affecting rigs and refineries near the Gulf of Mexico. So the extent to which the price of an oil product - such as gas for your car - can be manipulated through the MOC process is relatively small." Over 80 percent of the world's oil is owned and controlled by sovereign nations, but it's too difficult for the British and French to beat up on Saudi Arabia and Iraq to they choose BP and Shell instead.

US PRODUCTION ROLLS ON DESPITE GOVERNMENT EFFORTS

Thomas Pyle, writing for RealClearEnergy, maintains that politicians in the US don't do any better job in getting to the point on oil production. "At nearly every turn, the federal government is actively obstructing domestic energy production. For example, oil and natural gas production on federal lands is down by more than 40 percent compared to 10 years ago. Consider the impact in light of the government's vast landholdings: Uncle Sam owns 36.6 percent of Colorado, 57.4 percent of Utah and 42.3 percent of Wyoming. . . Instead of encouraging oil shale development, the Obama administration is keeping resource-rich regions in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming under lock and key. At stake is enough technically recoverable oil shale to provide American consumers with 140 years of electricity at current usage rates." Fortunately, there's still plenty of land east of the Rockies that isn't in federal hands and that's where oil is booming. "North Dakota, which leads the nation in job growth, wage increases, and low unemployment, owes much of its success to the shale energy boom and hydraulic fracturing advances. Meanwhile, as national unemployment hovers around 7.5 percent - more than twice the rate of North Dakota -- the federal government's policy toward energy production can only be described as a `bust.'" Hooray for the Bakken Shale.

MOTLEY FOOL CELEBRATES 10 INCREDIBLE NUMBERS FROM THE BAKKEN

In fact things are going so well in the Bakken that Matt DiLallo on Motley Fool has assembled 10 incredible numbers relating to output. We can't list them all here but this is a sampling: 1) "The Bakken and the associated Three Forks covers 14,700 square miles, making it the largest continuous crude oil accumulation in the U.S. The play covers North Dakota and Montana as well as parts of Canada." 2) Each well will probably play for 45 years. 3) Production costs are only $9 million per well. 4) Anticipated net profits per well are $23 million. 5) Only 5,000 of an anticipated 50,000 wells have yet been drilled. "The numbers don't lie," says DiLallo. "The Bakken is a phenomenal oil play that should produce for many years to come. As it does, those companies operating in the region will enjoy their share of profits." Good news from North Dakota.

IS T. BOONE PICKENS JUST THE LATEST "NATIONAL PLANNER?"

Is T. Boone Pickens' "energy plan" - whichever happens to be on the table at this moment - just another version of "national planning" so discredited by free-market economists? That's the contention of Robert Bradley, Jr. on MasterResource. "Pickens's grandiose scheme to use the powers of government to implement wind-for-natural-gas in electrical generation and natural-gas-for-oil in transportation (Pickens I) inspired Carl Pope, then head of the Sierra Club, to state back in 2008: "To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America." Of course Plan I didn't last long. Pickens quickly discovered that nobody wanted to build the transmission lines that would carry West Texas wind to the rest of the country. And wind wasn't so reliable anyway. But there have been Plans II and III, all based on the idea that natural gas can replace imported oil. Bradley's main point is that the market itself is a "plan" put together by the aggregated desires and capabilities of buyers and sellers. Any "government plan" is likely to be a scheme by powerful interests to override the market. The interesting thing here is how much this was anticipated by Adam Smith, not in the Wealth of Nations but in his other classic, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A good read.

MORE BAD TIMES AHEAD FOR APPALICHIA?

The slow eroding of the coal industry is not abating. It isn't just the EPA and its cross-state pollution rules. The decline is happening on many fronts. NRG, the nation's largest owner of coal plants, has settled a suit by New Jersey and Connecticut about emissions from its Midwestern plants and will close two units in Pennsylvania ahead of schedule. AES, the Midwestern utility, will either close several unites in Indiana and Ohio or convert them to gas. And don't expect coal exports to make too much of a difference. A report from Downstream Strategies of Morgantown, WVA says the Appalachain mining industry is in big trouble. "[M]uch of the its easy-to-reach coal seams have been mined out, meaning it takes more workers to keep production levels up, translating to higher labor costs, the report said. And electric utilities, traditionally the region's best customers, are retiring coal-fired plants or upgrading plants to burn cheaper natural gas, a trend the report says will continue into the future." A grim future unless the region can learn to make an adjustment.

CAN TESLA SPARK A RENAISSANCE IN ELECTRIC VEHICLES?

Finally, the recent success of Tesla's Model S electric vehicle has given new life to the idea that battery storage can do the job in the transport sector. Interestingly, there's a story afoot that Tesla may opt for the battery-switching technique that some people maintain is the key to EV success. But other fronts are advancing. Reports IEEE Specturm: "Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratory have made some long-awaited progress in lithium-air battery. . . . Lithium-air batteries promise five to 10 times greater storage capacity than traditional lithium-ion batteries, leading many to believe that they may hold the key to turning electrical vehicles from a niche market to a much larger segment of the automotive industry." And while many people thought that the lithium-ion battery fire aboard a Boeing Dreamliner last year might mark the end of batter transport, the company reports now that the problems have been solved and the planes will be back in action by June. Like the drunken beggar on horseback, progress sometimes lurches backward but mostly moves ahead.

The graph shows investment over the period of 2001 to 2012 for seven renewable sources in US dollars, from zero to $300 billion. The last gray bar represents fossil fuels in 2011. The biggest increase has been in solar and wind energy, which now constitute close to 90 percent of renewable investment. Large hydro used to dominate but is now a relatively small amount. Biomass has been fairly steady at $25 billion for some time. Other sources are negligible.

READ THE MANN-LOVINS DEBATE IN THE ATLANTIC

You couldn't find a better overview of our energy situation than Charles Mann's cover story in Atlantic this month, "We Will Never Run Out of Oil?" The title is provocative and also slightly off-kilter. Mann's main point is that the methane hydrates now being explored by Japan are a fossil fuel resource that dwarf conventional oil supplies- which are proving to be far more abundant than anyone anticipated anyway.  What fracking has done for conventional gas methane hydrates may do for overall energy supplies twenty years down the road. Like it or not, he says, hydrocarbons are going to remain our principal source of energy for a long, long time, if forever.

LOVINS JUMPS IN WITH HIS USUAL PANACHE

So why does Amory Lovins, the guru of "Soft Energy," feel compelled to jump in here? Well, as usual, he's ready to throw up a blizzard of statistics telling you that oil and gas are already too expensive and that wind and solar don't need any subsidies or mandates to beat them hands down. Reading Lovins is like watching a magician at work. You have to watch his hands. He disputes Mann's assertion - universally agreed upon in the engineering community - that trying to push wind and solar past 20 or 30 percent of grid electricity is going to cause disruptions and blackouts. "Germany was 23 percent renewable-powered in 2012 (doubled in six years), with two states in 2011 at 45 percent and 58 percent, while German power reliability rose to the highest in the European Union. Denmark was 41 percent renewable-powered in 2012 (peaking at 80 percent); Portugal, 45 percent (peaking at 100 percent the previous year, and rising to 70 percent for the whole first quarter of 2013). Earlier this year, Spain briefly achieved 61 percent renewable power and Germany 70 percent."  But it turns out Lovins is not talking just about wind and solar but ALL RENEWABLES, which includes hydroelectric dams. Those are the things the Sierra Club is always trying to tear down but they do come in handy when it comes to making clams about the reliability of renewable energy.  Beyond that, the 60 and 100 percent figures Lovins cites are only hit for a few hours at a time, which of course doesn't resolve the problem of providing electricity round the clock. But you have to read the whole exchange to appreciate all this. It's a great debate.

THE PROBLEM MAY BE EUROPE'S, NOT AMERICA'S

Peter Glover on Energy Tribune makes a decisive point. The world may not be running out of oil but Europe is. "[M]ost of Europe's oil comes from the North Sea region. A source where production has dropped to less than half of what it was in 2002. Much of the rest of it comes from countries such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, all countries threatened by political instability and social unrest. Europe could, of course, push development of its own potential oil resources. Or they could if the ludicrously inept EU Energy Road Map wasn't studded with anti-fossil fuel pot holes and renewable energy cul-de sacs that are deterring investors." Charles Mann notes that Winston Churchill started the whole Oil Era when he decided to convert the British Naval Fleet from coal to oil in 1911. Britain didn't have much oil at the time and so this necessitated a push into the Middle East. The rest is history. Wouldn't be ironic, however, if Europe ends up where it started - pushing back to coal because it does not want to adopt modern drilling technologies.  A sobering analysis. 

IF THE SHALE BOOM IS REAL, HOW CAN YOU INVEST?

Getting down to brass tacks, if this shale gas thing is really going to change the world, how can investors benefit? David Berman of the Toronto Globe and Mail has some advice: "Among refiners set to benefit: Phillips 66, Marathon Petroleum Corp. and Valero Energy Corp. Among chemical companies that are singled out, fertilizer producers received the biggest nods, given the importance of natural gas to their production. These companies include CF Industries Holdings Inc., Agrium Inc., Methanex Corp. and Rentech Nitrogen Partners. . . . As for regulated utilities . . . natural gas represents their single largest expense - and while cheaper energy is usually passed on to customers, the lower utility bills of customers translates into better relations between utilities and regulators. . . . Even railroads stand to benefit from the shale boom." There are lots of opportunities.

WHICH WAY WILL THE ADMINISTRATION JUMP ON GAS EXPORTS?

Writing in National Journal, Amy Harder takes an interesting perspective on the natural gas exports issue, writing from Cove Point, Maryland, where an LNG terminal built a decade ago now sits idle. The reason? It was originally built for imports, not exports. At the time it seemed we were running out of natural gas. Now that the situation is reversed, local folks want to reverse the flow and send natural gas from the Marcellus abroad. Harder notes how the issue cuts across political lines. While Republicans generally support free trade while Democrats think in terms of mercantilism, the district is represented by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a Democrat. He wants to see the facility revitalized. Concludes Harder: "]C]urrent law puts the decision-making power almost entirely within the executive branch. Many experts say that once Moniz is confirmed, the administration will finally let go of the pause button and decide one way or another about whether to export America's natural gas." A nice, even-handed report.

IS TESLA THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD?

Consumer Reports has given the all-electric Tesla what many are calling the greatest care review in history. That along with a first-quarter report of profit has dazzled Wall Street. The company stock has jumped 147 percent since the first of the year and Tesla - which has only two models, one of which sells for $104,000, now has a market capitalization one-quarter of General Motors. Is this a classic bubble in the making? Tesla is now the most shorted stock on the market. The staff of ValueWalk still finds something to admire: "What Tesla has accomplished isn't luck, it's real. Many funds approach an investment opportunity by first asking: does the company do something better or cheaper than anybody else? Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is beginning to convince the market it may do both. Competency in technology is migrating to engineering, manufacturing and marketing. Detroit, Munich, Wolfsburg and Toyota City must feel a sense of astonishment... with a hint of anxiety." As the Romans liked to say, buyer beware.

North Dakota has experienced a remarkable 41 percentincrease in gross domestic production since 2007 as a result of the Bakken development. Population has increased and both residential and commercial demand have risen as well. Remarkably, the North Dakota Industrial Commission nowforecastes an 88 percent increase in consumption of electricity for the state by 2017. This will come from increased oil activity. Two major oil refineries are now planned or under construction in order to process the oil within North Dakota.

It's not often that a respectable magazine such as Consumer Reports goes out on a limb, but the venerable reviewer of consumer products seems to have outdone itself with its review of the Tesla Model S. If it didn't call the $100,000 EV "the best car ever," it came close. In any case, investors are taking the review seriously. Boosted by the report that Tesla scored a profit in the 1st quarter, they have pushed Tesla's stock up 57 percent. So what's going on? The news from the EV front certainly isn't all good. Coda, another EV company, just declared bankruptcy, Renault-Nissan says it won't meet its sales quotas and Mitsubishi has gone back to $10,000 rebates in trying to move its vehicles. Can Tesla really defy all this? Todd Woody at Quartz says Elon Musk has simply created a status symbol for dentists. In Fortune, Michael Levi says this is the way disruptive products hit the market - from the top down. Michael Grunwald concurs by comparing Fisker to Solyndra and highlighting the deliberate, yet edifying ongoing experiment that is government investment in clean energy technology. But Windy Hill Investments, writing at Seeking Alpha, sense a little irrational exuberance in the market. Take your pick.

WHAT ABOUT THAT KEYSTONE PIPELINE?

As the Obama Administration slogs toward a decision on Keystone (Will it be this year? What about the 2014 elections?), everyone and his brother are trying to lay on the last word. Perhaps one of the best evaluations comes from Lynn Helms, director of the Department of Mineral Resources in the North Dakota Industrial Commission -- a person we don't always hear from these days. Helms has a ground-level view of what Keystone will mean in terms of carbon emissions, etc. "Helms went on to say that 71% of North Dakota's oil currently leaves by rail and an additional 10,000 b/d gets trucked to Canada to find a pipeline. Access to Keystone would mean 300 to 500 fewer long haul truck trips per day, which would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state by 1 million kilograms per day. He also stated North Dakota suffers 60 to 80 oil spills per year due to truck accidents. 'We believe in North Dakota that it's time to build KXL,' he concluded." This is all in a report from Jared Anderson on Breaking Energy, a new website. Well worth reading.

IS FRACKING THE NEXT NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST?

Even as the nation basks in the flood of natural gas coming out of the ground, opponents haven't given up on the idea that it's the worst thing to come along since -- nuclear power? Ellen Cantarow, on Slate, compares present-day fracking in Pennsylvania with the atomic fallout from 1950s bomb testing and says there's a tidal wave of health disasters building. "Fracking Ourselves to Death" is the title of her work. "Soon, the Smiths' cows began showing similar symptoms. Those that didn't die began aborting or giving birth to dead calves. All the chickens died, too. So did the barn cats. And so did three beloved dogs, none of them old, all previously healthy. A 2012 study by Michelle Bamberger and Cornell University pharmacology professor Robert Oswald indicates that, in the gas fields, these are typical symptoms in animals and often serve as early warning signs for their owners' subsequent illnesses." Can you trust these anecdotal reports that blame everything on the new technology? Who knows?

IS BILL MCKIBBEN EXAGGERATING GERMANY'S SOLAR SUCCESS?

Robert Wilson, a PhD Student in Mathematical Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, takes on climate guru Bill McKibben on The Energy Collective. Wilson is upset about a statement McKibben made in an interview where he claimed that "Munich's north of Montreal . . . got half their energy from solar panels" on certain days last December. Now this is the sort of issue where both sides are prone to exaggeration, but, in this case, nobody seems to be willing to look too closely. McKibben is getting his numbers from "a guy named Osha Davidson" writing in a 99-cent Kindle book called Clean Break. Not a very reliable source. But Wilson hardly does much better. All he can argue is that Germany was experiencing the darkest winter in 43 years, that the 50 percent figure may have been hit only briefly, and that getting half your electricity from solar isn't the same as getting half your energy. But as for what exactly happened in Munich last December, nobody seems capable of tracking it down. You need a Vaclav Smil to pin these things down.

CAN MOBILE NETWORKS REALLY REDUCE ENERGY USE BY 90%?

The Telco industry group called GreenTouch is making people rub their eyes with a report that mobile phone networks will be able to both reduce their energy consumption 90 percent by 2020 and handle all the anticipated increase in traffic. Huh? Well, apparently nobody in the industry has paid much attention to energy efficiency to this point. They've just been planting those communication towers designed to look like tall redwood trees growing in the middle of maple forests. "New small cell topologies could drastically reduce the power necessary to run mobile data networks since smaller the [sic] cell radiuses require less power necessary to maintain a connection, said Thierry Klein, GreenTouch's technical committee chair and head of Bell Labs green research. Those networks would have to be managed much differently than cellular systems are today, however, with cells automatically shutting off and turning on to meet the real-time capacity demands of subscribers." Of course theorizing on paper and putting things into practice are two different tasks. Still, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in the Telco industry.

ARE WINDMILLS GETTING A BIG PASS ON EAGLE DEATHS?

Finally, the Associated Press must be smarting over that Justice Department snooping because they're starting to run stories not all that flattering about the Obama Administration. In particular, there is today's report from Dina Cappiello that the Obama Administration has been looking the other way while those "Cuisinarts in the Sky" -- er, windmills -- make mincemeat out of a large segment of the nation's rare bird population. "More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country's wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin." Now the interesting this is that this story has been sitting around for nearly four years since Robert Bryce first reported it in The Wall Street Journal in September 2009.  Bryce wrote his story after the Obama Administration fined ExxonMobil $600,000 after 85 birds were killed by uncovered tanks at a oil wastewater facility. It's taken the AP four years to catch up with this story? Could it be that the Justice Department break-in is having an effect?

Republicans face a dual problem. The fiscal reality is that revenue gains from reducing tax deductions won’t be as substantial as they desire and, politically, Democrats will insist some of those gains go toward reducing the deficit.

The only way Congress can deliver the lower rates they’ve promised, given those inevitable constraints, is to find a new source for revenue. And the only one that both parties could potentially live with is a carbon tax.

The motivations for enacting tax reform are many: our tax code is a mess, we incentivize behavior that makes little economic sense, and there’s a growing belief that, in many respects, it is fundamentally unfair. This dissatisfaction is especially true for the corporate tax code, where a bipartisan coalition of congressmen is keen to cut the rate, which is among the world’s highest and serves as a disincentive to investment. Ultimately, investment in new machines, software and equipment improves worker productivity, boosts wages and creates jobs.

Some Democrats kvetch that corporations’ effective tax rate (what they actually pay once we take into account the various credits, deductions and exemptions) is relatively low and thus, we shouldn’t do them any favors. They are right that these tax expenditures drive average tax rates down while doing little for the economy. If we did away with the bulk of these provisions and used the savings to finance a lower rate, we would see more economic growth. Getting rid of all of these and using the revenue generated to offset reductions in the corporate tax rate would allow Congress to cut the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent (the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) to around 25 percent, which is what House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., has been promising the business community.

The problem arises that some those provisions have ardent defenders both inside and outside of Congress—most notably the Research & Experimentation Tax Credit, as well as provisions for bonus or “accelerated” depreciation, which lessens the cost of new investment in plant and equipment. Their constituencies include Silicon Valley and domestic manufacturers, who spend a great deal of money on capital investment. Eliminating these provisions in the context of a corporate tax reform that lowered rates across the board could result in a net tax increase for manufacturing and technology companies and a net reduction for investment banks, which may be a political impossibility.

If these two provisions remained in the tax code, then reaching a revenue-neutral 25 percent corporate rate would no longer be attainable. Even 30 percent might be difficult to deliver.

It may be possible to come up with $2 or $3 trillion of savings from reducing deductions in the personal tax code and use some of that revenue to finance a move to a 25 percent corporate rate. But any attempt to do so would easily be blown up by any member who points out the proposal would raise taxes on individuals to reduce taxes on corporations. No matter how patiently members explain to their constituencies that a lower corporate income tax would create jobs while boosting incomes, or that workers and consumers pay a portion of it, that isn’t going to fly.

So that leaves us with a corporate tax rate well above what the business community will swallow, and a dearth of ways to further reduce the rate.

Enter the carbon tax. Besides its intended purpose of reducing carbon emissions, it is politically advantageous, in that it is a tax that is relatively hidden. If phased in over a decade, the annual increase in gas prices that would result would be less than the typical annual fluctuations we already observe. And its other manifestations are also somewhat less than obvious—power bills will go up, but they’ve been inexorably increasing since time immemorial, even in places that get most of their power via natural gas.

From the corporate side, it does hit manufacturing harder than service companies, but it would be a small price most manufacturers would gladly be willing to pay for the preservation and improvement of accelerated depreciation and the R&E credit.

Some portions of the left may object that the carbon tax is not particularly progressive tax. But the inevitable result of any personal tax reform will be a marked increase in progressivity, and it’s hard to see progressives blowing up a chance at a carbon tax for that reason.

The historic Republican objection to dealing with climate change remains strong, but it is beginning to weaken—along with its opposition to both gay marriage and immigration reform, three issues that repel young people from the party. For a strong majority of young Americans, combating climate change and accepting gay marriage are non-negotiable positions for a politician to earn their support. While that may not be true in very conservative districts, Republicans with broader ambitions or who represent swing districts know they must escape party orthodoxy on these issues as soon as possible.

It is also an especially propitious time to think about a carbon tax. China’s recently announced plans to adopt a carbon tax renders moot the last legitimate excuse for ignoring climate change and provides an ostensible reason for Republicans to pivot on the issue.

The recent collapse of carbon prices in Europe—and the European Union’s inability to act in concert to fix it—means imposing a carbon tax in the United States ultimately would result in carbon reductions in Europe as well. In short, the global reduction in carbon emissions from the imposition of a U.S. carbon tax may be bigger now than at any other time over the last decade.

The odds are still long that we adopt a carbon tax. But the odds are equally long that some sort of comprehensive income tax goes through, as well. For the moment, their fates may be tied together.

Ike Brannon is senior fellow and director of research at the R Street Institute

The figures reversed somewhat in 2012, mainly because of a pause in coal plant closings and a rise in the price of natural gas. Coal is back up to 40 percent and natural gas slipped slightly to 26 percent.

The trend toward less coal usage is likely to continue, however, particularly after 2015, when 60 units producing 10 gigawatts are scheduled for closing

WILL THE EIS KILL GAS EXORTS?

Doug Ehrman on Motley Fool has a very interesting take on the gas export controversy this morning. He points out that while the Obama Administration is making encouraging noises about allowing natural gas exports, it may have one last trick up its sleeve in the old environmental maxim, "Think globally, act locally." Environmentalists have perfected the art of appearing to support supposedly favorable technologies while opposing them in practice. The Sierra Club, for instance, never stops promoting "renewable energy" but quietly goes around the country campaigning to tear down hydroelectric dams (including the Hetch-Hetchy, which proves San Francisco with half its electricity and 2/3 of its water). They love solar energy but oppose the power lines to bring it in from the desert. Ehrman notes the same thing could happen with gas exports. The Obama Administration could declare itself in favor but then delay it for years and years by failing to approve export terminals. The environmental impact statement (EIS) is always the key. Whoever met an EIS that couldn't be challenged in court? An interesting take on a controversial topic.

IS PRESIDENT OBAMA JUST REPEATING JIMMY CARTER'S MISTAKES?

The Obama Administration also takes a hit from Bob Beauprez, a former Colorado Congressman, who argues that the current President is following in the footsteps of President Jimmy Carter (above). who led the nation down a futile road in search of renewable energy in the 1970s. "Although many in America apparently don't remember that President Carter's renewable energy investments were an expensive failure, his warning stuck in the American psyche. . . . The latest global energy projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shatter the Carter-era myths. . . North America could provide 100 percent of U.S. demand for liquid fuels by 2024. That's an amazing feat considering the gloom and doom prognostications from the Carter Administration 36 years ago."

AND SPEAKING OF THAT NATURAL GAS EXPORT ISSUE . . . .

Matthew Daly of Associated Press does a good job of covering just about every aspect of the issue in a long takeout entitled "Natural Gas Export Plans Stir Debate." Daly points out that drilling companies have actually been pulling back their operations over the last two years because gas prices have gone so low. Opening up export markets would just bring new gas out of the ground, not raise prices. Still, major gas users such as Dow Chemical are using their prestige and political muscle to argue that exports will impoverish Americans. And of course the environmentalists, who are opposed to everything, are right there beside them urging everyone to leave the gas in the ground. Like Doug Ehrman on Motley Fool (above), Daly guesses that the Obama Administration will try go play it both ways - sanction gas exports in principle but drag its feet on issuing permits. "Kevin Book, an analyst for ClearView Energy Partners, a research and consulting firm, predicted that the administration will approve some new exports, but nowhere near the 20 projects that are pending before the Energy Department. `Everything we see from the administration suggests they embrace the idea of a small first-allocation' of LNG export permits, Book said. `They are looking for some subset to test the market.'"

TESLA STILL HAS ITS SKEPTICS

Tesla has announced its first quarterly profit ever, and has received a rave review from Consumer Reports. But market analysts are still wary, as Sue Chang reports in MarketWatch. "To date, Tesla's strong performance has been a function of its impressive factory ramp and marketing plan, but also two years of pent-up demand and the sale of lucrative ZEV [zero-emission-vehicle] credits," Ben Schuman, an analyst at Pacific Crest, wrote in a note on Thursday. "Going forward, the company needs to ramp to 25% gross margins from 5% (excluding ZEV credits) and demonstrate sustainable demand. This can be done, but we do not think the current valuation adequately reflects execution risk." A worthy note of caution to Tesla investors.

ARE MOBILE NETWORKS THE NEXT FRONT IN ENERGY SAVINGS?

The GreenTouch Consortium, made up of 50 telco companies and research organizations around the world, has astonished everyone by claming that the telecommunications industry can cut energy consumption up to 90 percent over the next decade with efficiency improvements ready for implementation. Apparently nobody has paid much attention to energy savings up to this point. All this would be done while handling the anticipated increases in traffic. "Specifically, the report will outline how the use of new small cell deployments in urban areas, infrastructure sharing between operators, and more dynamic allocation of network capacity could all serve to slash energy use. Thierry Van Landegem, chairman of the GreenTouch group, said there was a long way to go for the industry to deliver such drastic improvements, but he insisted they were feasible given the rapid emergence of increasingly efficient network technologies and protocols." Of course savings of this magnitude always look good on the drawing boards but can be difficult to put into practice. Let's see if the Telcos can deliver.

CHILE LOOKS TO ITS "RING OF FIRE" FOR NEW ENERGY

Finally, Chile may try tapping the long string of volcanoes that make up its spine for renewable energy. Volcanoes, after all, are just particularly concentrated forms of geothermal energy. New Zealand, Hawaii and Iceland are all volcanic islands and all get considerable portions of their electricity from resident volcanoes. Iceland is trying to go 100 percent geothermal and even export to Europe. There can be problems, though. "In September [2008]," reports Al Jazeera, "a 60-metre plume of steam erupted from one of the wells drilled by the consortium to extract and re-inject geothermal fluids in order to evaluate the area's potential for energy generation. This anomaly, which continued for more than three weeks, led the government to revoke the permit for these operations. Luis Mariano Rendón, director of Acción Ecológica, an environmental organization, said that, while all power generation has harmful effects, 'geothermal energy is a relatively low-impact source of power generation.'"

The language is newspeak. Introduced by George Orwell, it is characterized by using familiar words and phrases in unfamiliar ways. In the president's parlance, "fair" means skewering the upper middle-class and redistributing their wealth. "Necessary investments" are excuses to raise taxes and grow government.

Similar convoluted definitions exist in the president's energy policy pronouncements. His "all-of-the-above" approach apparently means wasting precious federal revenues on failed renewable projects while bankrupting the coal industry and slapping new taxes and regulations on U.S. oil and natural gas producers.

Promoting renewables is hardly a new idea. President Jimmy Carter tried it in the 1970s when the Iranian Revolution and gasoline lines made America fearful of its dependence on foreign oil. Speaking to the nation in April 1977, he called the energy crisis the "moral equivalent of war" and said "we must prepare . . . permanent renewable energy sources" because "we are now running out of gas and oil."

Although many in America apparently don't remember that President Carter's renewable energy investments were an expensive failure, his warning stuck in the American psyche. Today there are still countless Americans in denial about our ability to achieve North American energy independence in the near term.

The latest global energy projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shatter the Carter-era myths.

According to EIA, U.S. imports of foreign oil are plummeting and are expected to continue to fall in 2013 and 2014. Oil production in both OPEC and non-OPEC countries is expected to rise. New technologies, including hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, are rapidly expanding U.S. oil and natural gas production, while improved vehicle fuel economy and other factors are likely to continue reducing demand for oil.

Furthermore, North America could provide 100 percent of U.S. demand for liquid fuels by 2024. That's an amazing feat considering the gloom and doom prognostications from the Carter Administration 36 years ago.

Yet this good news is being downplayed by the Obama administration. Instead of a robust energy policy, including approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the president is clinging to oldspeak, or at least old ideas, to address a different dilemma - climate change.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions, he is promulgating regulations on traditional energy production while subsidizing renewable energy companies.

Simply put, the president is repeating historical mistakes by propping up energy sources that are as yet unreliable, unaffordable, and cannot compete without federal support.

The administration's latest embarrassment is Fisker Automotive, an electric car company that was expected to generate sales of more than $1 billion by 2012. Despite federal loan guarantees amounting to $193 million, the company recently fired 160 of its remaining 200 employees and hired a bankruptcy law firm. With the government likely to inherit the company, now worth only pennies on the dollar, a congressional panel is investigating the administration's investment.

To make matters worse for the president, climate scientists are at a loss to explain why the planet has not warmed in the past 16 years. As Richard Tol, professor and climate expert at England's University of Sussex, told Reuters, "My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years."

So far, questionable climate models and bankrupt renewable energy companies have not dampened the president's quest to save the planet from humans. Although he paid lip service to domestic oil and natural gas production in his recent State of the Union address, he said: "We must do more to combat climate change" to safeguard our future.

If the president ignores the promise of secure domestic oil and gas production and continues to embrace the failed energy policies of the 1970s, more federal dollars will be wasted, U.S. economic growth could remain slow, and millions of workers will continue to face an uncertain future. On the other hand, if the president encourages domestic oil and natural gas production, hundreds of thousands of jobs could be created in the energy industry, along with more than 1 million new manufacturing jobs.

As the president assembles his new team for his second term, there is very little reason for economic optimism. One thing we can count on, however, is that the president's policy pronouncements are likely to be couched in newspeak to camouflage their impact on our wallets.

Bob Beauprez runs Eagle's Wing Ranch in Northern Colorado with his wife Claudia and son Jim. He is a former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, congressman and candidate for Colorado governor. He is editor-in-chief of an online public policy magazine.

The biggest source of exports, of course, is the Persian Gulf. (Remember, this map just shows oil that is exportedm, not what is consumed at home.)  Persian Gulf oil - most of it from Saudi Arabia - travels through the Suez Canal, to Europe and the United States, and to the Far East through the Straits of Malacca. Nigeria is another major source of export, mostly to Europe, the United States and South America. Venezuela is also a large exporter, sending most of its oil to refineries in Texas.

The large black dots mark the crucial choke points - places where blockades or naval action could easily disrupt traffic.  The amount of oil that travels through each choke point is in the circle, measured in millions of barrels per day.

The most vulnerable is the Strait of Hormuz at the foot of the Persian Gulf, where one-fifth of the world's supply passes each day. The US has a naval presence there. The Straits of Malacca is another key point, since most Persian Gulf oil now ends up in the Far East.  The US Navy also patrols this narrow passage and recently increased its presence there. Other key maritime passages are the Bab el-Mandab at the foot of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Turkish Straits and the Panama Canal.

Roger Stern, professor at the University of Tulsa National Energy Policy Institute, has estimated that the United States has spent $8 trillion in maintaining a military presence at these key passages over recent decades.

The Institute for Energy Research did a little interesting research last week. Looking at the latest government reports, it found that the Department of Energy is claiming that it has created 2,300 new "green jobs" since 2009. But in that space of time it has spent $26 billion in its Section 1703 and 1705 loan programs. That calculates to $11 million per green job created. Is the program a success?  The Atlantic's Joan Bryna Michelson doesn't think so. She complains that too manyof these green jobs are going to men. "f the millions of jobs in the energy sector, only 12 percent are held by women, according to the renowned research firm Catalyst, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 13.6 percent of engineers and architects are women. One key job growing as a result of clean tech innovation is that of electrician, especially with development of the smart grid and new energy efficiency technologies. The BLS projects the number of electricians to increase by 23.2 percent by 2020. How many electricians are women? Just over two percent, the same as in 1970, according to the Census. Another economic opportunity lost to women." Hey gals, come on out to Texas and North Dakota. There are plenty of jobs out here.

IF GREENS OPPOSE FRACKING, KEYSTONE AND GAS EXPORTS, WHAT DON'T THEY OPPOSE?

Paul Driessen has an interesting take on the environmental position on natural gas. Supposedly they're in favor of gas as a "bridge fuel" that is going to carry us to the land of renewable energy. Burning natural gas in electricity boilers is one thing - it replaces coal. But getting it out of the ground is entirely another. They don't want fracking, which is the only thing that has made the natural gas boom possible. They're also opposed to exporting natural gas, even though it will help other countries lower their carbon emissions and air pollution. "[Exports] will also help ensure that more factories and power plants in more countries burn natural gas, thereby replacing coal and providing the economic wherewithal to enable China, India and other nations to install modern pollution abatement technologies on their now dirty power plants. That will greatly improve air quality and human health in countless cities, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing consternation among steadily dwindling numbers of climate alarmists." Then there's the matter of 23 million unemployed Americans. Don't they deserve a little action on the energy development front? On well, when you're sitting in some comfortable NGO offices in the suburbs of Washington, your perspective changes.

IS THE WORLD THE NEXT MARKET FOR US COAL?

Jen Alic on OilPrice.com tackles the great paradox that is beginning to emerge from the EPA's campaign to shut down American coal plants. As we reduce coal consumption in this country, the market in the rest of the world is beginning to heat up. Both Japan and Germany are closing down their nuclear fleets, which means more US coal. Europe is still trapped in a vice buying expensive natural gas from Russia. The solution? US coal. As coal consumption declines in this country, prices are forced down, which makes it more attractive to foreign buyers. "Demand in Asia is skyrocketing, particularly in China, the largest burner of coal in the world, and Japan, which is reducing its reliance on nuclear power, and India, where the pace of economic growth is too fast to maintain enough coal supplies. So now the race is on to get this cheap US coal to these overseas markets. While Illinois has access to the Gulf of Mexico, for Wyoming and Montana, it largely goes through Canadian ports. Thus, the race is being defined by who can build the domestic infrastructure fastest. Exporters are eyeing four new terminals in Oregon and Washington to this end. If built, these terminals could handle up to 130 million tons of additional capacity a year." That's the way markets work. Change something in one place, there are always consequences in another. A good story.

IS THE MARCELLUS REALLY ANOTHER SAUDI ARABIA?

CNBC's Javier Davis is even more enthusiastic, saying that the gas pouring out of the Marcellus Shale has the potential to turn Pennsylvania into another Saudi Arabia. That may be carrying things a little far but the potential is still enormous. "In a recent study, Deloitte and Touche said Marcellus "is projected to dominate the Mid-Atlantic natural gas market." The consulting firm added that other regions like the Gulf Coast and the suddenly hot Bakken region in North Dakota "may face stiff competition" as Marcellus is poised to churn out more than 7 billion cubic feet of shale gas per day. `We literally have the Saudi Arabia of natural gas under our feet,' said Michael Krancer, a lawyer who heads Blank Rome's energy practice and who is also a former Pennsylvania secretary of environmental protection." And just think of poor New York on the other side of the border where residents must sit and watch this happening while Yoko Ono and other Manhattan celebrities keep the Empire State from joining in. Maybe, as in other underdeveloped parts of the world, New Yorkers can become "guest workers" in Pennsylvania's thriving economy.

IS ALL THIS NATURAL GAS JUST A BUBBLE?

There are still contrarians views around. Bill Powers, a liberal contrarians, says it's all a bubble. A critic of former Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon, Powers says that once frackers find a "sweet spot" they quickly hit diminishing returns, which leads to a "drilling treadmill." He says this "could lead to a domestic gas crisis akin to the one faced in the 1970's." Somebody ought to tell him that the great 1977 Natural Gas Shortage was entirely the result of federal price controls.  On Forbes, Robert Ayres, INSEAD Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science and Technology Management, has a more sophisticated view. He presents graphs showing that, despite the current boom, the amount of oil found in the world each year is regularly surpassed by the amount consumed. That's the old "Peak Oil" argument. Does it still hold, even though it keeps getting postponed into the future? Well, there's always room for one more contrarians.

SKIP THE BIOFUELS. THESE PLANTS CAN GENERATE ELECTRICITY

Researches at the University of Georgia claim they have found a way of interrupting photosynthesis so that they can capture electrons before the plants turn them into sugar. That means that instead of generating biomass, the photosynthetic process can be used directly to generate electricity. The scientists say this is the say to improve current conversions of sunlight to electricity through photovoltaic panels, which can only operate at a conversion rate of 25 percent. "In the near term, this technology might best be used for remote sensors or other portable electronic equipment that requires less power to run," he said. "If we are able to leverage technologies like genetic engineering to enhance stability of the plant photosynthetic machineries," researcher Ramaraja Ramasamy tells Nature World News. "I'm very hopeful that this technology will be competitive to traditional solar panels in the future."

Most of the closings are in the Appalachian Basin and along the East Coast, where plants are fed by high-sulfur Appalachian Coal. But the giant 800-MW Navaho plant in Arizona is also in the EPA's sites. It fees Los Angeles. Probably most of these boilers will be replaced by units burning natural gas. Prices are already climbing and if the US starts exporting and natural gas vehicles gain a foothold, the price may not stay down forever. This will eventually be reflected in electrical rates.

TODAY'S TAKEAWAY: IS KLEINER PERKINS SORRY IT EVER MET AL GORE?

It was the biggest story in energy six years ago. Former Vice President Al Gore sitting in the Kleiner Perkins board room, making quick calls to Washington and piloting Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firm into the Next Big Thing - clean energy! Well the dust has cleared and KP is now, as The New York Times puts it, "humbled." Gore didn't make out badly as a senior partner. Recent reports said his net worth increased by $100 million from his various energy investments. But today's Times story from Randall Smith says that Kleiner Perkins' turn to clean energy has produced a net loss of 1.9 percent annually from 2000-2010 after racking up annual returns of 35.7 percent in the previous decade. You could have predicted it all a decade ago. The venture into green energy was premised on finding some "Moore's Law" that would make solar energy improve at the same rate computers have done since the 1960s. But energy isn't information. It's not subject to the same exponential improvements. Consequently KP has gotten stuck backing a lot of start-ups whose promise is to improve solar output by 5-10 percent. That's not the stuff of Apple and Intel. And the worst is yet to come, as KP still stands to lose $100 million on Fisker's collapse.  It all goes to show that even the investment gurus of Silicon Valley can be swept away by energy fads.

SO DOES THIS MAKE BARACK OBAMA THE ENVIRONMENTAL PRESIDENT?

That's what John Chait tells us in New York magazine this week. It seems that Gore has been taking potshots at Obama for failing to pass a climate bill and halt the rise of the oceans as promised in his original 2008 campaign. This has set off a bit of a spitting fight in the precincts of Manhattan as to who is The Man as far as carbon emissions go. Nicholas LeMann of The New Yorker recently wrote an obituary for the environmental movement, saying Obama's failure to shepherd cap-and-trade through Congress was the equivalent of the Ottoman Empire's failure to take Vienna in 1683. But now Chait is coming to the President' rescue. He finds a silver lining in this State-of-the-Union promise: "I will direct my Cabinet, to come up with executive actions we can take now and in the future to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy." "It sounded a little vague," writes Chait, "[b]ut a handful of environmental wonks had a fairly strong grasp of the project he had committed himself to, and they understood that it was very, very real and very, very doable. If they were to have summarized the news, the headline would have been OBAMA TO SAVE PLANET." It's a long, tendentious artile but worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

AND NOW THE REAL STORY: AMERICAN OIL PRODUCTION SURGES

Who knows? In ten years President Obama may be remembered as the Chief Executive who ended three decades of decline in American oil production and put us on the road to energy independence. That's what's happening on his watch in any case and if the President wants to take credit, why not? (He certainly didn't mind during the campaign.) CNBC reports that US oil production is now at a 21-year peak and crude supplies are at an 82-year high. Domestic production has just about pulled even with imports. "I think we could go to parity by the end of the year," John Kilduff of Again Capital tells CNBC. "The logistics and the rejiggering of the supply distribution system is really remarkable. By the end of the year, on top of all the pipeline efforts, we're going to have about 1.2 million barrels of oil riding the rails." Isn't it wonderful to have an Administration that is so supportive of fossil fuels?

NOT ONLY THAT, NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO SELL US ON CARBON DIOXIDE

It's bad enough that traditional energy sources are proving to be much more productive and reliable than the "renewable" kind. Now former astronaut and U.S. Senator Harrison Schmitt and Princeton physics professor William Happer are arguing that carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet! It's a very sophisticated argument perhaps only accessible to plant biologists, but they argue that there's a trade-off between a plant's need for water and CO2. Because CO2 levels have risen in recent decades, plants have now become more drought-resistant: "Crop yields in recent dry years were less affected by drought than crops of the dust-bowl droughts of the 1930s, when there was less carbon dioxide. Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it's a wonder that humanitarians aren't clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, some are denouncing it." It's an argument that hasn't been heard to date and certain to put global warming concerns in a new perspective. In today's Wall Street Journal.

HAS SEQUESTRATION BEEN GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?

And while we're on the subject of paradoxes, Todd Woody on Quartz comes up with the unorthodox proposal that the Sequestration has actually been good for the environment! This counters the convention wisdom that the government's 4 percent cutback in spending has been the greatest national disaster since Pearl Harbor. (The New York Times recently ran a tear-jerker that made you think there must be a market in selling "I Survived Sequestration" t-shirts.) "The mandatory US federal budget cuts known as sequestration may seem like bad news for environmental programs," writes Woody. "But there's a green lining to government dysfunction: less money to carry out environmentally damaging policies. Case in point: Citing the sequester, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has postponed pending lease sales for oil and gas exploration in California until at least October, when the new fiscal year begins. Those leases include 1,278 acres (517 hectares) of government land sitting atop the Monterey Shale, a vast geological formation that holds the US's largest reserve of shale oil, an estimated 15.4 billion barrels." So if Big Government hasn't been able to prevent the development of US oil resources, maybe Smaller Government can do the trick! An interesting thought there.

DOES TURNING OUT SOLAR PANELS COMPENSATE FOR BEING THE WORLD'S LEADER IN SMOG?

Finally, Ramez Naam on Slate has another interesting contrarians idea. China's cities may be choked in air pollution so that there is a huge brown cloud visible from space hanging over the entire nation. But there's actually "the World Leader in Fighting Climate Change." The reason? There are seven, actually, but here are a few: 1) China turns out more solar panels, 2) China has cap-and-trade, 2) "China loves wind more than coal." Then there's this: "China's leaders are not like America's. There's a preponderance of scientists and engineers among China's rulers. New President Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, earned a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, held a degree in electrical engineering." Now why didn't President Obama skip that stint in law school and go for a chemical engineering degree? In fact, China and India's increases in carbon emissions are completely wiping out any gains that are being made in the developing nations, where emissions have been declining for some time. It's not their fault - they've got huge populations to feed and coal is all that's available right now. But the important less is this: When it comes to pleasing climate warriors, it's the thought, not the results, that count.

The graphic tires to illustrate much of this. The top map shows where our oil originates. Much is now coming from Africa, South America and the Persian Gulf. But imports from Nigeria, which mostly go to the East Coast, have declined 50 percent since 2010 and by 2014 we may be able to reduce imports to the lowest level since 1987.

The map at the bottom shows where imports come from by sector. The East Coast imports mostly from Africa and the Middle East. The upper Midwest gets a small portion from Canada but is now largely self-sufficient because of the Bakken Shale. The West Coast gets from Canada, Arabia and Ecuador, of all places. Only about a million barrels a day are imported there, since California and Alaska are still producing.

Where the figures are deceptive is in the Enterprise Belt of Texas and Louisiana. Almost 3 million barrels a day are imported there, from Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. All of Venezuela's output goes into the Gulf states. But much of this oil is being imported only to be refined and exported again. In fact, we are Venezuela's major refiner. And on finished oil products, we now export more than we import.

Altogether our "oil dependency" is hardly more threatening than our "manufacturing dependency" on China. There's hardly any danger anymore of an Arab Oil Embargo. The real question is how far we can go in reducing our trade deficit and actually earning foreign dollars by exporting natural gas and oil products to other countries.

IS ENVIRONMENTALISM KILLING THE ECONOMY?

Marita Noon tackles the difficult question of just how far environmentalists will go before they begin to damage the U.S. economy. She quotes the Christian Science Monitor's recent Earth Day coverage in noting that tremendous progress has been made since the 1970s and that things may no longer be at a crisis level. Quoting Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, now an advocate of nuclear energy, she writes: "Moore says: 'What happened is environmental extremism. They've abandoned science and logic altogether.' Their message today is 'anti': anti-human, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-trade and globalization, anti-business and capitalism, and ultimately, anti-civilization." A long, thoughtful piece.

CAN JAPAN DO IT WITHOUT NUCLEAR?

Nassrine Azimi, a senior adviser at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in Hiroshima, on the other hand, writes a long, lyrical piece in The New York Times on how wonderful things are going to be when Japan finally abandons nuclear energy and goes to a renewable economy. "If rats and radioactive leaks were not enough of a reminder of the dangerous state of the nuclear cleanup efforts, there has been a spate of earthquakes recently. Seismic activity in a country that experiences at least 10 percent of all the earthquakes in the world is of course not news, but so many strong jolts can hardly be reassuring. Still, there is also good news on the energy front. The feed-in tariff system, jump-started by the government last July to make solar energy more competitive, has succeeded beyond expectation. Investments in solar, wind and geothermal are all on the rise." Things can get real dreamy-eyed working for the United Nations.

WILL FOREIGN COMPANIES CONTROL AMERCAN OIL?

While everyone is celebrating the resurgence of American oil production these days, Ellen Wald, writing in The Washington Times, warns that foreign companies are making inroads into America's domestic oil industry. "Today, the largest oil refinery in the United States, Motiva in Texas, is owned by Saudi Aramco (a state-owned company) and Royal Dutch Shell (a British and Dutch company). The refinery recently completed a major expansion project, originally driven by growing American demand for Saudi oil in 2007. Since the expansion began, however, U.S. demand for oil has fallen and production of North American oil has risen. Saudi Aramco has, therefore, repositioned Motiva to accept this change in the market. In addition to importing Saudi oil, the Motiva expansion allows Saudi Aramco to refine and export petroleum products to Latin American markets." So it's true the Seven Sisters no longer stand astride the world oil industry the way they once did. But is that any reason to worry about foreign ownership of American refineries. After all, the Saudis have a lot of money to invest. Would we prefer they put it somewhere else?

HAS CALIFORNIA ALREADY BANNED FRACKING?

The Golden State may still be smarting over The Wall Street Journal's recent scolding of its inability to develop its vast oil reserves but you wouldn't know it.  Reporting from the West Coast, Quartz's Todd Woody says that California legislators may already be closing the door to development of the huge Monterey Shale with a series of bills that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to apply new technologies. "Have environmentalists already won the war over fracking in California? It's starting to look that way. A trio of bills swiftly moving through the state's legislature would ban hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, until the practice is deemed safe." And we all know what "until it seems safe" means. No energy technology is ever completely safe, especially to people who are opposed to it.

CAN BATTERIES MAKE WIND ENERGY MORE RELIABLE?

Kevin Bullis, writing at MIT Technology Review, ventures into the nettled world of energy storage and whether there are any technologies out there that can be coupled with wind and solar energy to overcome their unpredictability. He notes that GE is advertising a new windmill that comes with a battery capable of storing its full capacity for - are you ready for this - one minute! One minute of power. Boy, that'll get you someplace. But, says Bullis, GE also has magic algorithms that it claims can extend this power out to one hour. Well, maybe not quite. It turns out what the system can do is make up the difference between what the windmill can produce and what it has been predicted to produce. In other words, if the wind dies down you've got to find some other source of power. But if you KNOW it's going to die down and it dies down even more, the battery can make up the difference - for an hour or so. It's amazing how little these things change, despite all the hoopla about advances in renewable energy. Almost ten years ago, the IEEE said that with good forecasts and existing technology, grid operators could tolerate about 20 percent of its capacity from windmills. Now Bullis tells us: "The exact point when renewables become a problem depends on a slew of factors. But in many cases, renewables can account for about 20 percent of the grid capacity without causing trouble. . . However, even at rapid paces of development, it will be decades before renewable energy exceeds 40 percent of generating capacity in most places." And right now Marc Jacobsen of Stanford is telling New York it can achieve 100 percent by 2030!

CAN COAL MAKE A COMEBACK?

Finally, the Institute for Energy Research tells us that reports of American coal's complete demise may be a little premature, but the long-range trend is still down with a huge number of retirements in the works if current EPA regulations go into effect. Coal's share has actually rebounded a bit this year, back up to 40 percent from 37 percent over the first two months. But don't be fooled. The EPA is scheduled to shutter 60 units in 2015, up from 55 last year. Most of them will be in the Appalachian Basin, but the Navaho Plant on the California-Arizona border is targeted as well. There goes 800 megawatts for Los Angeles! "The National Economic Research Associates found compliance costs to be $21 billion per year and lost jobs to amount to 183,000 per year. Because the increased costs will be passed to consumers through higher electricity rates, businesses will be forced to reduce jobs as well. Studies project that retail electricity prices will increase between 10 and 20 percent in most of the country and over 20 percent in the coal-dependent states in the Midwest." Maybe that answers the question at the top of the Bulletin: Is environmentalism hurting the US economy?

According to EarthDayCentral.com, one of the goals of Earth Day is to help you "Discover what you can do to save the environment."

Perhaps, people no longer see the need for planetary salvation.

The Christian Science Monitor offered an Earth Day 2013 report card on global warming. The author starts with: "When Earth Day observances first began in 1970, Cleveland had recently doused a pollutant-fueled fire on a section of the Cuyahoga River. Cities were often shrouded in thick blankets of smog. And large portions of Lake Erie were so fouled by industrial, farm, and sewage runoff that sections of the 241-mile-long lake were pronounced dead." And later, he reports: "Since that first Earth Day, the air over major cities is cleaner. Lake Erie is healthier. So is the Cuyahoga River, which groups in Cleveland would like to turn into a centerpiece of urban life. The improvements have come with ‘yes, but...' as other environmental challenges have elbowed their way to the fore. But for the most part, tools are in place to deal with them."

As Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, explains, the ‘80s ushered in the age of environmental extremism. The basic issues, for which he and Greenpeace fought, had largely been accomplished, and the general public was in agreement with the primary message. In order for the environmentalists to remain employed, they had to adopt ever more extreme positions. Moore says: "What happened is environmental extremism. They've abandoned science and logic altogether." Their message today is "anti:" anti-human, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-trade and globalization, anti-business and capitalism, and ultimately, anti-civilization.

Moore's view helps understand how the environmental movement has gone from trying to save the planet to killing the US economy.

The American economy has some basic problems. We need more well-paid jobs, increased revenue, and our trade balance is out of whack. Each of these issues could be easily addressed, but environmentalists are doing everything they can to kill potential solutions. Three such examples are coal mining and exporting; natural gas extraction and conversion to liquefied natural gas (LNG) that can then be exported; and the Keystone pipeline-all of which face extreme opposition from environmentalists.

COAL
The US has the world's largest economically recoverable coal resources-with more than one-fourth of the world's reserves. Unfortunately, our policies have stymied growth in the mining industry. Bill Bissett, President of Kentucky Coal Association, told me: "Our industry is accustomed to market fluctuations and competition with other fuel sources, but having a federal government place additional regulations on one geographic region (Eastern KY and WV) and one industry (coal mining) is absolutely unfair."

Last month, environmental groups (including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace) sent a letter to newly-confirmed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell calling for a moratorium on the leasing of federal lands for coal mining in the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Montana and Wyoming-which accounts for about forty percent of US coal reserves. The results of a recent lease sale in Wyoming, offers insight regarding the economic importance of leasing these federal lands for coal mining. Peabody Coal paid nearly $800 million to the US Government for the rights to expand an existing coal mine and maintain their current workforce. The $800 million was a "bonus payment" and gives them the right to lease the coal and pay 12.5% of the sales price as a royalty. According to data from the Bureau of Land Management, 13 active coal mines in the Wyoming portion of the PRB alone, employ more than 6800 workers.

While, as Bissett addressed, policy under this administration has harshly singled out coal and the coal miners for punishment, coal's low cost and abundance continues to make it a highly preferential fuel for power generation in developing countries like China and India. And, as I've previously written, even Europe is increasing its use of coal for electricity generation, as they've discovered the prohibitively high cost of renewables. In 2011, exports to European and Asian markets represented 76% of total US coal exports-up 31% compared to 2010.

Currently, US coal is easily shipped to Europe from ports on the east coast, but the US is missing out on the important Asian market-now being met by more expensive Australian competitors-due to infrastructure opposition from environmental groups. In the Los Angeles Times (LAT), Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and a legend in the world of climate activism, wrote: "Those exports can't really take off, however, unless West Coast ports dramatically expand their deepwater loading capacity. ... Environmentalists are trying desperately to block the port expansion." Addressing the situation, the Wall Street Journal states: "there are now no major coal exporting facilities on the US West Coast. Washington State, with its proximity to coal-rich Wyoming and Montana, is seen as the best place to start." PRB coal is being shipped to China and India through Vancouver. Additionally, the countries' needs are being filled by Australian and Indonesian coal-so environmentalists' fears that shipping US coal will undermine "everything we've accomplished," as Sierra Club spokesman David Graham-Caso says, are wrong. The coal is being shipped and used-but the US is losing out on the jobs (which would be mostly union jobs), the revenue, and the benefit to the trade deficit. The LAT/McKibben piece cites KC Golden, policy director of Seattle's Climate Solutions group: "Can you imagine standing at the mouth of the Columbia River, watching ships sail in from Asia carrying solar panels and electric car batteries and plasma TVs, passing ships from America carrying coal?" Worse, can you imagine all those goods coming in-manufactured using Australian coal-fueled electricity, and nothing going out? That's what we have now.

A report from the Energy Policy Research Foundation states: "US production will merely replace higher cost production. ... Neither net world coal combustion nor GHG emissions will change as a result of an expansion of US coal exports." The report concludes: "The higher net value received is in effect a wealth transfer from foreign consumers to US producers and the national economy. This net gain to the national economy shows up in higher returns to invested capital, greater employment opportunities from expanded investment, higher revenues to state, local and federal governments, and higher lease values on coal reserves from federal and state lands."

But environmental groups don't want this "net economic gain to the national economy." Apparently, they'd prefer that we continue to borrow from China's Australian coal-fueled economy.

LNG
LNG faces a similar problem. Natural gas was once the favored choice of environmentalists-until privately funded hydraulic fracturing (or high pressure drilling) advancements made it plentiful and, consequently cheap. The low-cost fuel snatched away the fossil fuel-free dream that seemed to be almost within reach. Now environmentalists oppose natural gas as well. The Sierra Club's Beyond Natural Gas site claims: "Increasing reliance on natural gas displaces the market for clean energy."

Many countries want US natural gas. Unlike coal, natural gas cannot just be put on a ship and sent to the awaiting customer. It must first be liquefied-hence the term LNG. The liquefaction process requires costly facilities, which, for economic reasons, need a large customer base-many with which the US does not have free trade agreements (though the Energy Department can permit them, provided it determines that such ventures are consistent with the public interest). The International Business Times, on March 1, 2013, reports that: "As of this date, 17 applications for multibillion-dollar facilities to turn the commodity into liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for export are under review by the Energy Department." Let's hope they don't take as many years and as many reviews as the Keystone pipeline.

LNG exports could have a tremendous positive impact on the US economy. A recent IHS global insight report concluded that LNG exports would "result in the creation of over 100,000 direct, indirect, and economy wide jobs and have an immediate economic impact resulting in $3.6 to $5.2 billion in potential annual revenues."

And, LNG exporting would not only create jobs and increase revenue, it would also reduce trade deficits. A just-released report from the Rio Grande Foundation states: "The United States currently runs a $6 billion trade deficit with Japan. That nation is particularly eager to import LNG from the US due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima."

Once again, environmentalists oppose jobs, revenue, and trade-deficit reduction. Earlier this year, more than 40 groups and individuals took out a half page ad in the New York Times that said: "Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to overseas markets will mean more drilling and fracking on US land, which are dirty and dangerous practices."

KEYSTONE
Like coal mining and export, natural gas extraction, liquefaction, and export, the Keystone pipeline would create thousands of union jobs and increased service employment in supporting communities; benefit local and state economies, and provide additional revenues to the federal coffers; and help balance the trade deficit, as some of the refined product would be exported. But once again, environmental opposition has targeted the pipeline-causing delay after delay that has now postponed the economic benefit of the pipeline.

Last week, Russ Girling, TransCanada, CEO, said: "I believe that those that are fundamentally opposed to our pipeline are getting louder and more shrill as we move towards a decision." He announced that the potential start date must be moved from the previously planned late 2014 or early 2015 to late 2015.

The Keystone pipeline saga is the same song, another verse.

These are just three current examples of how the influence of environmental organizations is driving policy in the name of planetary salvation that is, in reality, resulting in economic devastation that could lead to humanity's ultimate starvation. Environmental motivations are less about saving the planet and more about killing the global economy-while enriching themselves at taxpayers' expense.

The author of Energy Freedom, Marita Noon serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). Together they work to educate the public and influence policy makers regarding energy, its role in freedom, and the American way of life. Combining energy, news, politics, and, the environment through public events, speaking engagements, and media, the organizations' combined efforts serve as America's voice for energy.

Of course investing in clean energy does not mean that you're going to have clean energy. Germany has hardly reduced its emissions from other sources and in fact has been forced to build more coal plants because solar and wind must be constantly backed up with other sources. The United States has reduced carbon emissions but this has been mostly the result of converting coal plants to natural gas. Wind contributes irregularly and the input from solar electricity is still miniscule compared to other sources.

Why China is investing in so-called clean energy is something of a mystery. It would seem to be immune from the fashions and anti-nuclear passions that drive much of clean investment in the Western world. It may be just that China is investing more in everything these days. Certainly its investment in coal plants dwarfs anything in Europe or America.

President Obama may be about to weigh in on the issue of whether we should allow natural gas exports. Speaking in Costa Rica, he suggested that the benefits from commerce and our support of free trade in the world should outweigh the arguments of major manufacturers that exports will raise gas prices at home. Environmentalists, of course, who are opposed to everything involving fossil fuels, are taking the side of the manufacturers. The argument that exports are going to cause huge increases in domestic prices doesn't really weigh that much since without sending it abroad most of that gas may stay in the ground. Drilling rigs have been pulling back in the Marcellus because of low prices. Now some of that gas could help cut carbon emissions abroad and loosen Gazprom's grip on Europe and Asia. Slowly but surely, the Administration may be moving to a sensible decision.

MICHAEL LEVI ON CAP-AND-TRADE

With the publication of his new book Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity and the Battle for America's Future, Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations is emerging as one of this most skilled commentators on the global energy picture. Today he weighs in on the apparent collapse of Europe's cap-and-trade system. The problem, he says, isn't that cap-and-trade doesn't work well in quantifying the market externalities of carbon emissions. The problem is that, when faced with the consequences for the economy, politicians will always back off. "The fundamental problem in Europe right now isn't that cap-and-trade is a technically flawed mechanism; it's that politicians don't want to act strongly on climate change." A good analysis. 

TEXAS EMBARRASSES CALIFORNIA ON OIL DEVELOPMENT

The Wall Street Journal has an extraordinary graph showing how oil production in Texas has nearly doubled in the past two years while flat-lining in California. Yet the Golden State has just as much oil and in fact the Monterey Shale, which stretches southeast from the Bay Area, may be the biggest oil untapped oil reservoir in the country. So what has happened? Well, Texans love oil and don't mind developing it while California politics are now dominated by upper-middle-class people who say "I've got mine" and aren't interested in developing any more resources. Governor Jerry Brown, who is still mesmerized by the pinwheels of wind and solar energy, embodies this ethic. "California has the natural resources and technical expertise to be the next Texas if it wants to be. What it needs is the political will. California Governor Jerry Brown at least says he wants to drill, but his dominant Democratic Party is so beholden to the already-rich greens that the state is paralyzed. So the oil remains locked in the ground, as one million Californians look for work, as its schools and roads deteriorate, and as it keeps raising taxes to balance the budget. What a tragedy. Imagine how fast the U.S. economy would grow if California were more like Texas."

ARE WE FINALLY REACHING THE LIMITS OF THE ETHANOL MANDATE?

Probably no federal program has illustrated the dangers of trying to run the economy out of Washingtonthan more than the 33-year-old ethanol mandate, a program that now diverts nearly half of America's corn crop into gas tanks while providing no visible benefits and driving up food prices around the world. Yet, ethanol has produced a huge vested interest in the nation's farmers and ethanol refineries, which are fighting to the death to keep the mandate in place. Herman Wang, writing at Platts, recounts a confrontation on Capitol Hill yesterday where Monte Shaw, director of the Iowa Renewables Fuel Association took on Marcus Kobliz of the American Petroleum Institute over the looming "blend wall," where government quotas will require the oil industry to start blending 15 percent ethanol into gasoline, a point where the API says it will start harming engines. "The heated exchange highlights the building tension between Big Oil and Big Corn as they battle over the Renewable Fuel Standard's ethanol blending mandate. . . . Expect sparks to continue to fly on the issue in Washington for the foreseeable future. EPA has yet to finalize its 2013 mandate - proposed in January - to blend 16.55 billion gallons of renewable fuels into gasoline and diesel supplies." A behind-the-scenes exchange that will definitely become more visible in the future.

ARE THERE REALLY MORE SOLAR WORKERS THAN COAL MINERS?

Another one of those blockbusters that sensible heads are trying to track down was a CNN report last week that there are now more solar workers than coal miners in the United States. The figure, of course, was handed to CNN by The Solar Foundation and rushed into print as proof that solar panels will soon be taking over from coal in producing our electricity. On The Daily Beast, however, Matthew Zeitlin takes a more level-headed approach. He notes that the 87,000 figure for coal miners includes only people who go down into the mines rather than those who work for the industry. The 119,000 "solar workers" figure includes "employees who spend at least 50% of their times supporting solar-related activities." That could include staff members at The Solar Foundation. But the real question is why employing a lot of people in producing energy is a measure of success. Isn't energy innovation supposed to replace human labor? There are only 16,000 uranium miners in America yet they produce almost half as much energy as the 84,000 coal miners. That's because uranium's energy is much more highly-concentrated and it doesn't take as much work to get it out of the ground. "A lump of coal packs a lot more power than a solar panel, which helps explain why you don't need that many coal-mining workers to produce such a large amount of electricity," explains Zeitlin. "Other factors also come into play. Many solar installations are small (say, a couple dozen panels on the roof of a house), and are being put up all over the country in a labor-intensive process." Maybe solar's great labor force is just a measure of how inefficient it is in harnessing energy.

THE EPA GIVES A BIG BOOST TO SHALE

Finally, Ken Silverstein, writing in Forbes, recapitulates last week's EPA report, which showed that natural gas fracking's methane releases may be much less than anticipated. Fracking opponents have regularly used the methane argument as a trump card in their crusade against natural gas development. But the EPA says the threat is exaggerated. Besides, the EPA reports, gas is making a lot of progress in bringing down carbon emissions. "Its annual report detailing greenhouse gases shows that those releases fell by 1.6 percent between 2011 and 2012. . . . Those figures are consistent with what the U.S. Energy Information Administration has reported, which is that carbon dioxide emissions fell by 2.4 percent between 2010 and 2011. They are also 9.1 less than in 2007." It's not often that the news coming out of the EPA is that good.

There are other potential outlets as well. The solid lines indicate existing pipeline and the dotted lines are proposed pipelines. One solution would be to go through British Columbia to the Pacific but the province is resisting that. There are existing lines into the United States but they don't have much capacity. Another idea would be to go north to Valdez where the Alaskan Oil Pipeline originates. That port could also handle Canadian heavy oil.

One way or another, says Alter, the oil is going to get out.

Somewhere in the early years of the first Obama Administration an editorial cartoonists drew a picture of President Obama felling a huge tree called the “US Economy.” On the tree stump he was watering a little sprout called “green jobs.” That’s pretty much the way things went the first four years. But suddenly things are turning around. New drilling techniques are producing a flood of new fossil fuels and now it’s beginning to reflect in the economy. The latest upsurge in jobs is being attributed to energy booms in Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, so-called “clean investments” have sunk to the lowest level since 2009. Is the Green Era over? It could happen.

CHINA SLOWS DOWN, WILL OIL SAG?

At the same time, the world economy seems to be slowing down, led by China, which is regressing to the mean in terms of annual growth. A huge increase in energy demand is still expected out of Asia but it may not be enough to sustain oil prices at speculative levels. Writes Ruchir Sharma on LiveMint: “The wreckage caused by China’s great, juddering slowdown continues to spread far beyond the country’s shores. Although most commodities enjoyed a bounce on 3 May, after better-than-expected US employment data, the plunge in their prices over the past few months suggests the past decade’s rally is truly broken. For those of us not in the mining industry, this is actually good news—one of the best signs yet that the global economy is returning to normal.” Bad for speculators perhaps, but probably good for the oil market.

IS COAL MAKING A COMEBACK?

One of the strangest outcomes of the fracking boom has been a surge in coal exports from the US. Coal’s share of our electrical output is plummeting. It’s now down to 36 percent, an historical low. The reason is the substitution of natural gas. But that has cheapened coal and opened up opportunities in world markets. Europe needs coal because Germany is giving up nuclear and Gazprom is charging monopoly prices. Japan is drifting away from nuclear as well. And of course China and India’s demands remain almost insatiable. As a result, Illinois recorded all-time highs in coal exports last year and ports in the Pacific Northwest are preparing for more export traffic. All this is bound to cause a huge row with environmentalists, who thought they had beaten coal to death. Writes Hal Bernton in the Seattle Times: “In Montana last summer, 23 people were arrested during a week of protests in the state capital over plans by Arch Coal, the nation's second-largest coal company, to develop a new mine that could send coal to Asia. `We ought to do all we can to control our own use of coal,’ said Denis Hayes, chief executive of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation and the organizer of the first Earth Day. ‘But we don't accomplish much if we export it to Asia. The atmosphere is indifferent.’”

WILL JAPAN REALLY GIVE UP NUCLEAR?

The question still looms as President Shinto Abe makes his world tour, courting the Kremlin and the oil sheiks of the Persian Gulf, trying to solve Japan’s energy problems. The economy is reeling under the costs of electricity as the nation still copes with the legacy of Fukushima. Japan is signaling that it will welcome a US decision to export natural gas surpluses but the decision may still be far away. (But did President Obama just signal he might be in favor? There was a little wiggle there for a moment.) But Javier David on CNBC speculates that Japan’s current attempts to devalue its currency will push the country back into nuclear, willy-nilly. “Japan's aggressive monetary policy and its sliding currency may have an unintended side-effect: pushing the country back into the embrace of nuclear technology, a power source the country has avoided since a nuclear disaster two years ago. . . .Japan's reliance on fossil fuels and liquefied natural gas imports are eroding what used to be the developed world's largest trade surplus. That dynamic is worsened by a weak yen—which has plunged recently as the Bank of Japan embraced money printing on steroids—that is driving up import prices.”

CAN CAP-AND-TRADE BE SAVED?

The carbon market has crashed and burned in Europe, as politicians refused to raise the price of carbon permits even as they sunk to near-zero. The debacle seems to indicate that even with an elaborate mechanism for trading emissions in place, politicians will always hesitate to clamp down if it means hurting businesses and shedding jobs. But David Roberts of Grist, always a climate enthusiast, says that we shouldn’t be discouraged by the European incident. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative set up by seven states in the northeast, is still functioning well: “RGGI is pretty modest as these things go. It only covers power plants, and only those 25 megawatts or greater. (There are 211 covered plants at the moment.) Its first three-year trading period ended at the end of 2011. Thus far, it seems to be working as planned — better than planned, actually. Over the 2008-11 period, CO2 emissions from covered plants were down 23 percent compared to the three years prior. That’s 126 million short tons of emissions eliminated. In fact, over 2008-11, RGGI power plants came in 33 percent under the cap set by the program.”

WILL WE EVENTUALLY HARVEST ENERGY FROM SPACE?

Finally, James Conca in Forbes gets a little ahead of the curve by asking what energy sources will be necessary for space colonization. It won’t be a one-way trip, however. Leaning on a recent report from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Conca says that we may eventually have to harvest non-renewable resources from space to keep things going here on earth. “Off-world settlements will provide fuel and life support materials for space missions and planetary operations, and for return of goods to Earth. . . . Energy resources that can be harvested in space for the benefit of Earth include helium-3 that occurs in abundance on both the Moon and asteroids and is ideal for new small fusion plants, as well as solar energy that can be collected and transmitted in concentrated form to Earth.” But all that is far, far in the future.

There seems to be a variety of reasons, not the least is which the development of fracking technology in the United States. Not that we're exporting large amounts of gas to Europe. But the substitution of natural gas for electrical generation in this country has freed up coal supplies. This has driven down the price and increased exports to Europe. Just last week Illinois announced its highest export rate in history. The construction of new pipelines into Poland and from Central Asia has helped as well.

Just four years ago, Russia was able to hold the Ukraine hostage over a price dispute, cutting off supplies in the middle of winter. This year Bulgaria negotiated a 20 percent reduction in price because of Gazprom's weakening market leverage.

The Russians are trying to make up for this diminishing market by selling gas in the Far East. Japan, Korea and China are the likely customers.

What's also happening is a subtle revival of the working-class ethic. Jordan Weissmann tells us in The Atlantic that the Bakken Boom in North Dakota is making the working-class rich. There haven't been this kind of frontier blue-collar opportunities in America in a long time. Meanwhile, in Colorado, it is middle-class people who are leading the opposition against oil drilling - under the leadership of the Democratic Party! Without anyone noticing, the Democrats have become the representatives of upscale people (government bureaucrats included) while the other party - whatever its name is - has taken up the cause of striving up-and-comers. Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper is dissenting from the Democrats' anti-oil gambit in Colorado, however. He still feels uncomfortable with the whole thing.

If there were any doubts remaining that fracking and fossil fuels are on the march, they were erased by the latest EPA report on the technology which has concluded - surprisingly - that methane releases are much less than previously estimated. Methane - which has 22 times the greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide - has been the anti-fracking campaigners' main argument against natural gas. Now the EPA says that those fears are exaggerated. Just for good measure, the report says concerns about water pollution are overestimated as well. Is the EPA finally starting to take a clear-eyed look at environmental dangers? William Tucker on Nuclear Townhall says they're starting to make sense about the dangers of nuclear radiation as well.

Finally, President Obama is in Mexico discussing cross-border issues with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in a delicate "first dance" meeting. Mexico has just filed suit against BP over the Gulf oil spill as BP handed over the first payments of a $1 billion restoration along the US coast. Time to get in on some of that money. And while he's south of the border, maybe the President can give his counterpart a few tips on how to get one of those big oil booms going.

Now suddenly all that has turned around - in Texas. The nation's most enterprising state, filled with savvy oilmen like George Mitchell, has come up with the new horizontal drilling and "fracturing" technologies that are wringing more oil than ever out of shale deposits such as the Eagle Ford. Texas alone was the 13th largest oil producing state in the world last and could rise to 8th if current trends persist. The state produced 1500 new jobs every business day last year and with only 8.2 percent of the population it created 17 percent of US payroll jobs in 2012.

Just think what can happen when North Dakota, Montana, Pennsylvania and Ohio hit full stride.

Nuclear continues to thrive abroad and wither at home. Mitsubishi and Areva have won a joint bid to develop a reactor in Turkey. Russia has announced it will invest $31 billion in developing its nuclear technology. But Southern California Electric says it may close its huge San Onofre Reactor if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't allow it to reopen soon. And in Texas, the NRC has killed the South Texas project on the basis of - get this - the two reactors were going to be built by a foreign company, Toshiba. Do they think there are any American companies left in the nuclear construction business?

Colorado will up its renewable requirement from 10 percent to 20 percent under a law now awaiting Governor John Hickenlooper's signature. He'll sign. But in Connecticut the state senate has undercut environmentalists' push for more renewables by allowing Canadian hydropower to count under that category. The enviros wanted the mandate to be satisfied only by solar and wind.

Finally, Stuart Barns suggests on OilPrice that maybe the current energy boom is going to lead to a revival in manufacturing. There have been a lot of conflicting claims on this lately. In National Interest, Amy Harder notes that we have lots more oil and gas than we thought and the Texas Tribune says there's lots more shale out there to be discovered And on Atomic Insights, And on Atomic Insights, NuScale CEO Paul Lorenzini tackles a ridiculous study that claims nuclear reactors kill more birds than windmills. He makes a good case for scientific fraud.

The graph above was published by Motley Fool from data compiled by the Energy Information Administration. It shows that nearly 6 trillion cubic feet of the 7 tcf total is still coming from the Southwest. The Barnett is the granddaddy of them all, pioneered over the 1990s by the legendary George Mitchell. It started producing in the middle of the last decade. Output there has now leveled but is now almost matched by the Haynesville of Texas and Louisiana, which is still rapidly expanding. The Fayetteville Arkansas, the Wood ford in Oklahoma and the Eagle Ford in Texas all make large contributions. The Marcellus contributes about 1/7th of the nation's total output but is still expanding. And Ohio is just beginning to tap its own Utica Shale. The best may be yet to come. Altogether, shale now represents about 30 percent of US production, with 42 percent still coming from conventional wells.

Economists attribute this huge upsurge in production to the American system of property rights, where private individuals are allowed to sell the rights to minerals beneath their land. In most of the rest of the world, mineral rights are owned by governments, which are usually reluctant to allow development - either from bureaucratic inertia or trumped-up environmental concern or lack of proper bribes. Thus the gas resources lie fallow - much as they do beneath the 60 percent of the land owned by the federal government west if the Rockies. Just this week the BLM announced it will be giving preference to solar and windmill installations over mining on its lands.

The above graph compares the performance of energy-intensive industries such as iron, steel, aluminum, agricultural chemicals and plastics with the rest of American industry. Although the energy-intensive sector dipped further after the 2008 recession, they have not made any exceptional progress.

Deutsche Bank economist Peter Hooper makes the point that, although these industries are "energy intensive," energy still remains a small portion of their input: Deciding on a plant location is a complex decision that considers not only input costs but the location of demand as well," he writes. "[W]e would express some caution about forecasting a US manufacturing revolution based on lower energy prices alone." Instead, he argues that while rising labor costs in the rest of the world and cheap natural gas from the shale revolution will benefit US industries, the impact may be more muted than anticipated.

Global warming or global cooling? The nation's second coldest spring in history has left climate scientists scratching their heads. Denver is about to get hit with another snowstorm and natural gas prices have surged from all the extra heating requirements. But don't worry, the global warming enthusiasts will come up with something. You see the real impact of global warming will be extreme weather, right? And cold weather is just as extreme as hot. QED. Also, PolicyMic, the liberal blog, is now suggesting that Neanderthals may be to blame.

In Washington, the House GOP is taking potshots at a ripe target, the recent demise of the Fisker $100,000 "People's Electric car." Not hard. Charles Lane of the Washington Post explains the government's bad $529 million bet on Fisker. But Paul Waldman, writing on The American Prospect, says it's not yet time to give up on green technology. Meanwhile, the Keystone Pipeline controversy continues to simmer as 83-year-old former Liberal Prime Minister John Turner heads for Washington to appeal to the Obama Administration. He may find "liberal" doesn't mean the same thing below the border. TransCanada has announced that the regulatory delays mean the pipeline will not be in service until late 2015 - if it is ever approved. And on TreeHugger, Lloyd Alter gives us a map showing how if US approval is not forthcoming, Canada will just ship the oil to the thawing Arctic Ocean.

Finally, the BLM has expanded the new policy of preferring renewable energy to everything else by giving renewable projects priority over mining on federal land. The GOP is supporting renewables, however, in the business of extending the tax breaks of master limited partnerships to renewables as the operate for fossil fuels. Did Republicans ever meet a tax break it didn't like? And while China is emerging as the world leader in renewable technology, Verizon is throwing in its bit by investing $100 million in renewable projects. Is this the new Google? Stay tuned.

Clean Skies estimated what LNG will sell for as a fuel under a scenario of natural gas prices ranging from $4 to $8 per million BTU equivalent (MMBtu). Even at the highest projected natural gas prices, LNG comes in at about half the cost of conventional gasoline

The chart breaks out natural gas commodity costs (green), the operating and maintenance costs of the compression and distribution system (light blue) and the retail markup for dealerships (blue). All these are estimates. The latter two do not change.  At $4 per MMBtu - the current gasoline equivalent - LNG sells for the gasoline equivalent of $1.50 per gallon. At $8 per MMBtu it sells at $2.25 per gallon. This week the Henry Hubb price of gas, set at wells in Texas, was $4.20 per MMBtu. This is the price people use when they are talking about "$3 natural gas."

With gasoline selling at close to $4 per gallon, the investment opportunity here is enormous. It will all depend on how quickly investors decide to move into the field - or whether other alternatives such as transforming natural gas into methanol prove more attractive. (This would require a rule change from the EPA.)  The transition is already underway.  It appears that making the switch with trucks will be easier since they are better suited to carry the heavy LNG fuel tanks and run more centralized routes, which will facilitate the siting of fueling stations. Don't' be surprised if this price spread motivates investments.

Chris Paine, the filmmaker who make the dubious documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is at it again. Responding to the demise of Fisker, he gives us "5 Myths About Electric Cars That Need Debunking." The myths are that EVvs aren't the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Matthew Stepp, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, asks whether a carbon tax would boost clean energy. David Levitan, in IEEE Spectrum, wonders if there isn't a solar mirage taking shape in the Middle East. But then the desert is a good place for mirages. Cass Sunstein, in the Toronto Globe & Mail, says it might help people choose to make green alternatives the default. And Brian McConnell in Resilience, says he's found a great example of a disruptive technology . . . . solar energy.

Finally, Martin LaMonica says SoloPower, a niche provider of thin-film solar, may become the latest subsidized casualty. Tyler Crowe, writing in Motley Fool, tackles the question of whether oil companies pay enough taxes. And Felicity Carus, in The Guardian, tells how the NFL (above) has become a champion of sustainability - all on today's RealClearEnergy.org.

Mexican exports reached 1.7 billion cubic feet per day in 2012, almost double the rate of 0.9 bcf/d in 2010. Until that year the rate had been steady for almost a decade. Mexico is now rapidly converting electrical generation from coal to natural gas. Existing pipelines now carry gas from Houston and El Paso to Mexico City and other locations on Mexico's eastern coast. But a proposed pipeline from Tucson that would carry gas to the western coast would add another 770 million cf per day. Total U.S. gas production in the Lower 48 is now 70 bcf/d with another 10 bcf from Alaska.

Coal may be making a comeback as well as Japan starts building new coal plants and hunting for imports. Australia is interpreting a sale to power companies at $95 a ton as the end of a four-year slump in prices. In the US, however, a study at Duke University says 65 percent of American coal plants will be targeted by new EPA regulations. The Los Angeles City Council has voted to convert the Intermountain Power Plant in Utah to natural gas but plant officials warn it could cost consumers as much as $500 million.

French President Francois Hollande's visit to China has produced a new agreement (above) between the two countries to develop nuclear technology. France still likes to consider itself the leader in the field. On the other hand, the US refusal to allow Korea to reprocess its own fuel - even though the technology does not isolate plutonium - has displeased Korean scientists. Meanwhile, Congress will mull once again what to do with America's spent fuel since reprocessing has been ruled out in this country as well.

Finally, Volvo is claiming that some engineering changes have produced a 25 percent jump in fuel-burning efficiency in its latest models. British researches also claim they have cut costs in the production of fuel cells. Japan has begun testing whether it can extract methane from the undersea methane hydrates. Researchers at the University of Nebraska say they have developed superstrong, supertough nanotech fibers that could make a huge difference in reducing the weight of transport vehicles. And Karel Smrcka, writing in Engineering News, says graphene will be the plastic of the 21st century.

As you can see from the graph, wind and solar edged toward half the power load only between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. during the day. The wind (green) was fairly steady throughout the day and night and solar kicked in with a big boost in the middle of the day. At its height around noon, wind and solar were providing about 37,000 MW while other forms of generation (gray) were at only about 32,000. But even over the 24-hour period, fossil fuels and nuclear provided quite a bit more electricity. And this was on a day when the wind blew and the sun shone.

The more telling figure is Angela Merkel's recent lament that fossil fuel plants are being forced to lose money because wind and solar are always given preference when they are available. Merkel has proposed paying a "capacity" fee to fossil and nuclear plants for being available even when they are not needed. But that means Germans will be paying for their electricity twice! No wonder power costs have risen 50 percent since Germany began the nuclear phase-out and are now scheduled to rise even more.

Drilling is starting to come back in the Gulf of Mexico as production climbs and deepwater activity rises. To top it off, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it will auction off 21 million acres in August. Even Pemex, the Mexican national oil company, says it is increasing production. And the Main Pass Energy Hub in Louisiana has just signed a contract to deliver natural gas to India's Petronet. Things are humming.

Secretary-designate Ernest Moniz's confirmation is still being held up by South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, who's aggravated because President Obama wants to cancel the plutonium recycling plant that is almost completed in his home state. Republicans are also having a field day in Washington bashing the collapse of Fisker Motors, which had received a big federal grant. But Kevin Bullis in MIT Tech Review asks who cares if Fisker failed? (No one but taxpayers perhaps.)

Finally, natural gas vehicles seem to be breaking out. UPS (above) has just put in an order to add 700 to its delivery fleet this year. New Jersey is going to build filling stations and Pennsylvania is looking for ways to aid the conversion. (They have plenty of gas in the Marcellus.) Cummins has begun shipping truck engines and Anthony Ingram gives a nice explanation in the Christian Science Monitor as to why CNG works better in trucks than automobiles. Maybe T. Boone Pickens was right after all.

After festering in the doldrums for more than two years, natural gas prices have suddenly risen 35 percent in the last two months. "There's always a bull market somewhere," is an old saying on Wall Street and gas now seems to be the place.

The graph compares four major indexes for commodity prices. Gas is the blue line that has been headed straight up. Gold is the red line where the bottom has just dropped out. The green line is West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTIC), which is also declining. (Oil and gas once always ran in tandem.) The DBA (purple line) is the PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (the "DB" may stand for Dun & Bradstreet), which is a basket of farm commodities.

On UncommonWisdomDaily,com, Sean Brodrick points to low levels of gas in storage, increased pipeline capacity and growing exports to Mexico as reason to believe gas prices will keep rising.

Senator Lindsay Graham has put a hold on the confirmation of Secretary of Energy-designee Ernest Moniz but it has nothing to do with his support from fracking. Graham is aggravated because President Obama is proposing to cut funds for the nuclear reprocessing plant now nearing completely in South Carolina. It's another one of those Senate quirks where one lawmaker can grind things to a halt. Moniz actually supports nuclear and will probably make it through. Meanwhile, former Secretary Steven Chu has now formally retired as the longest-tenured Energy Secretary in history.

Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski has turned the tables by proposing that "master limited partnership," a tax device long used by the oil companies, be extended to renewable energy projects as well. MLPs allow investment projects to function as partnerships but trade as stocks - kind of a subchapter S for publicly traded companies. Even the American Petroleum Industry says they will back the effort - nice of them to share the wealth. In National Journal, Amy Harder notes that the idea originated in Americans for Prosperity, a think tank funded by the Koch Brothers. It looks as if even conservatives are falling in love with renewable energy.

Finally, rising natural gas prices have already produced what some have long feared - a return to coal. The Energy Information Administration reports that a 33 percent increase in the Henry Hub price from Feb 2012 to Feb 2013 has prompted a 12 percent decline in natural gas consumption by utilities and a corresponding 7 percent increase in coal. The "dash to gas" has produced a dramatic decline in carbon emissions but as many have feared, the reduction may only be temporary.

Qatar is not the world’s largest exporter but Australia is moving up fast and is expected to emerge as #1 by 2016. The east coast of Africa is also drawing the attention of Asian nations. The red arrows indicate the direction of transport with the numbers of tcf entering and exiting each country. 

Japan and Korea are resource poor and Japan has been particularly vulnerable since it decided to close down all its nuclear reactors, losing one-third of its electricity. It has tried to make up the difference with imported gas, raising the price for $12 per mcf. In the U.S., fracking has reduced the price to $3 per mcf. Cheniere Energy is currently attempting to build a huge new export terminal in Louisiana but the Department of Energy hasn’t even decided yet whether it will allow anyone to export gas.

Will U.S. gas soon be joining this thriving international market? Stay tuned.

Worker safety scored even better, reaching an all-time low of 0.05 accidents per 200,0000 worker hours - well below the injury rate in many non-industrial businesses. Working in the nuclear industry is now safer than working in the FIRE - finance, insurance and real estate - sector.

Unfortunately, things are going the same in the developing nations. Over the brief period of 2005-2011, China has increased its emission by 3.252 billion metric tons - three times the reductions made in the developed countries. India and Russia have also added their part. If global emissions are ever to be reduced, the developing nations will have to be enlisted to the cause.

Europe's carbon market collapse has not been a good harbinger of Earth Day and the obituaries are still being written. Robert Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, says it was good branding but poor substance. Silvio Marcacci on The Energy Collective says the collapse won't kill the idea of cap-and-trade, but Brad Plumer of the Washington Post wonders if the European program is really salvageable.

The 17th International Conference & Exhibition on Liquefied Natural Gas is winding up in Houston and the mood there is upbeat. Attendees say they're witnessing the emergence of a dynamic world LNG market. It looks like LNG may also be poised to move into the transport sector - truckingt and marine transport first but perhaps the auto market eventually as well. The Houston Chronicle calls it a "paradigm shift."

Finally, the dreams of development in Africa based around its vast energy resources still continue to attract developers one and all. Arab News says that energy finds in East Africa are fueling growth. And in fact VideoCon, an Indian company, just announced a big gas find off Mozambique in conjunction with Anadarko. Joseph Romm has plans for greening the Sahara (not even Napoleon tried that) and in Europe there are always dreams of tapping Sahara solar with a cross-Mediterranean electric grid.

The graph pits gold (in gold) over the last five years, as measured by the S&P GSCI Gold Index, versus natural gas (green) as measured by the S&P GSCI Natural Gas Index. The gas index peaked above $600 but in 2008 but has since plunged below $100. The trend over the last year, however, has been upward. The gold index peaked at $1,100 in 2011 but has since lost almost 30 percent of that value.

So is natural gas ready to replace gold and silver as the world's last-resort currency? Well, maybe it won't go that far.

Energy efficiency will become the centerpiece of a tepid effort to create bipartisan goodwill on Capitol Hill as New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Ohio Republican Rob Portman line up support for a renewed effort at passing a bill that failed next year. The legislation is free of all subsidies and mandates. The government would set voluntary standards for building codes. Grist says this one may have a chance to pass - and may not do any harm in the offing.

Europe continues to put its head in the noose by promoting the Nord Stream, another gas pipeline through Poland that will make Europe even more dependent on Russian gas. A French senator has urged his country to embrace fracking for more energy independence, but President Laurence Hollande is still opposed. Britain seems to be moving cautiously toward the technology as a driller assures his countrymen that fracking won't mar the British landscape (as opposed to windmills?). Meanwhile, Europe's failure to make carbon trading work is reverberating around the globe.

Electric vehicles took another beating at Chrysler-Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne told the Society of Automotive Engineers' World Conference in Detroit that his company will lose $10,000 on every EV it puts out this year. Marchionne said electric vehicles are not the only solution to global warning and asked for freedom and technological neutrality in choosing among alternative fuels.

Finally, in the way of technological breakthroughs, commentators are still wondering of that 2000X battery technology announced at the University of Illinois this week can really work. Lithium-ion batteries are already prone to fire at current levels. Would a battery with 2000 times the charge become an under-the-hood car bomb? We'll find out. Meanwhile, Intelligent Energy has announced an improvement in fuel cell density and Silcon Valley inventor Bill Gray has announced the design of a new flywheel.

Europe's carbon market is in a shambles as the EU Parliament rejected a new rule for "backloading" that would have increased carbon prices. The legislators said they didn't want to jeopardize European industry with higher costs. Emissions prices have plunged far below their already low rate and there is speculation the whole effort to price carbon may collapse. The effects are being felt as far away as Australia, where the Aussies were planning to sell carbon credits to European companies to fill a $10 billion budget hole. But China says its plans to tax carbon will go ahead.

Secretary of State John Kerry was non-committal on the Keystone Pipeline in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, although he did promise there would be "no stalling" in the decision. Observers think the Administration would like to stay as far away as possible from the issue, which is sure to enflame either labor unions or environmentalists. Mother Jones says science can even predict where you stand on Keystone. If you're for gay rights, you reject Keystone and vice versa.

Finally, the ethanol mandate may finally be approaching the scaffold in Congress. Production is dropping and a bi-partisan coalition of free-market, pro-energy Republicans and consumer-oriented Democrats are teaming to challenge it in Congress.  The lone support, of course, will come from the farm lobby, which is the only beneficiary of the vast subsidy. Hard-core environmentalists may chip in but they are having a harder and harder time defending biofuels against studies such as this week's Chatham House report, which said that biofuels are causing famines around the world while making the climate situation worse. But they're still "green," right?

A report from Britain's Chatham House has savaged biofuels as perhaps the worst idea in the history of humanity. (The language of one headline is a lot worse, but we're not going to reprint it here.) The think tank says the effort to turn crops into fuel is causing famines around the world (above) and isn't helping a bit on reducing climate change. It required a 10 billion euro "Cyprus-sized" bailout in 2011 and will costs motorists 13 billion euros by 2020. Altogether, they're "worse than fossil fuels." Amory Lovins, are you here to answer?

Europe's carbon market is also at the point of collapse as Parliament shied away from raising energy costs to consumers and industry and voted against reducing the number of permits available. Observers speculate it may be a death blow to the system.  With industrial activity down, carbon permits are now so cheap that they are having no impact. The price collapse is even being felt in Australia, which had planned to sell offsets to Europe. Unfortunately, self-discipline always collapses when the going gets tough. On Time, Bryan Walsh asks, "If carbon pricing can't work in Europe, where can it?"

Finally, Europe's International Energy Agency has weighed in with is own report lamenting that almost no progress has been made in reducing carbon emissions and that "energy is just as dirty as it was 20 years ago." The IEA wants a redoubled effort on capturing carbon and says we have to put 20 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020. Quite a day for reports.

Microsoft is touting its new Redmond campus (above) as a "smart city" designed to conserve energy in every conceivable way. The company has even come up with a unique time-lapse demonstration of how the new campus was constructed. WalMart also has a plan to go to 100 percent renewables and reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent. But the word coming out of TechCentral is that data centers may be even worse energy hogs than thought.

The Associated Press has a photo essay showing how natural gas fracking transforms fortunes and land. Energy Tomorrow argues that the Keystone Pipeline will bring ample rewards in jobs and prosperity. And Matthew Stepp and Alex Trembath argue on Breakthrough that environmentalists have gotten dangerously lost in trying to obstruct the pipeline.

Have China and Iceland become bosom buddies in the Arctic? It appears so, according to the Christian Science Monitor. But then China is everywhere these days. Tim Daiss on Energy Tribune says that Japan's quest for shale gas is sparking skepticism but Steve LeVine on Quartz introduces to the new petrostate in the world - Ethiopia!

Finally, researchers in Israel say they have come up with a metal-air battery design involving aluminum that can provide a range of 1000 for an electric car. Internal combustion engines only provide around 500. Environment News says that waste sulfur may make better car batteries and David Talbot, on MIT Technology Review, wants to introduce us to an algorithm that could cut energy use in data centers by 35 percent. All on the frontiers of energy technology.

On the oil side, demand seems to be slowing as China slackens off, pushing the price of crude below $89 a barrel. Alaska has slashed its oil tax in an effort to increase production from Prudhoe Bay. Oman will build the world's largest oil storage facility and France has a facility that recycles oil.

The nuclear industry reports a strong year for reactor, with a new low for unplanned shutdowns – despite the long-term loss of San Onofre. The World Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference in Singapore also heard that the outlook is positive. But Hitachi is hesitating on building the next wave of reactors in Britain and Lord Hutton, chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association, says that Britain’s energy security will be at risk if Hinckley Point is not build. In the US, the Obama Administration is also intent on defunding the South Carolina MOX reprocessing plant.

Finally, solar electricity constituted all the new US capacity added in March. And the EPA is funding a study to look at barriers to renewable energy. But investment fell 22 percent in the first quarter as subsidies were cut and in Massachusetts residents are objecting to too much solar in their neighborhood.

In order to support its contention, it has marshaled the above graph of spending trends in the Department of Energy over the last 15 years with figures from the American Associating for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The first thing to notice is that what AAAS as energy R&D is at an all-time high - just under $12 billion. The amount for atomic defense has been fairly constant and dominates. But this isn't "energy." The Office of Science R&D rates second but this is disbursed over a wide range of projects. The amount devoted specifically to energy is now about $2 billion and has seems to be at the same peak established in 2010.

What is notable is now long "efficiency and renewables" have dominated energy spending. The popular impression is appropriates for these are fairly recent and are not nearly enough. But they have been the largest portion since 1997 and now surpass all others combined. (Critics of nuclear usually include nuclear defense spending under nuclear energy in order to argue that it dominates.)

Nuclear spending was miniscule until 2008, when it experienced a revival. It still surpasses fossil fuel spending, which was high throughout the last decade but is now near an all-time low. The recent addition has been ARPA-E, which is also largely devoted to research on energy efficiency, renewables, and other "alternatives."

The caption for the graph in the Post says: "The Energy Department's R&D program has a big focus on renewables and efficiency, but there's also money for nuclear power and fossil fuels." That is indeed true.