Energy and the Environment

Now this is innovative and interesting thinking: The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private…

The Reality Campaign has lured the Coen Brothers into making a commercial to mock the whole idea of "clean coal": [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJVbdiMgfM[/youtube] Their signature dry (and quirky) humor is on full…

The NYT did an article almost a month ago showing how the Gulf States are looking beyond their carbon riches to thoughts of becoming a clean energy exporter:

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Instead of insisting that their carbon resources will last forever, or even insisting that economies will always be dependent upon carbon, the oil-rich Gulf States are looking to hedge their wealth and market dominance by making huge investments in research and development in the major labs in many premiere western nations. And we know that the person who pays for the research typically owns the work product or at least the patents on resulting products; the country that exports the energy reaps the economic benefits.

The economic news and anxieties are certainly dominating the news today, but the off shore drilling circus starts in earnest today. On Friday,though, there was a bipartisan Energy Summit brought up by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asks a key question to put all of this in context:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnJAIeEgjSM[/youtube]

To which he gets no answer. Which isn’t surprising when you note that there is little oil at stake, but a lot of taxpayer funds to be had.