2012 July 12

Documentary Short: Natural Gas Drilling Threatens The Wild Heart Of Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest

By Tom Kenworthy

Yesterday the Center for American Progress and the Sierra Club released a series of short documentary videos called “Public Lands, Private Profits.”   The first two stories profiled the new rush to extract uranium near Grand Canyon National Park and a proposed expansion of a coal mine near Bryce Canyon National Park.

Part three explores a remote corner of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and how it might be transformed by a natural gas drilling plan.

The Noble Basin sits in the shadow of the Wyoming Range, most of which was protected from energy development by Congress in 2009.  But previous leases bought by energy companies can still be developed, and that includes one proposal for 136 wells to be drilled by Plains Exploration and Production (PXP), a Texas company.

Opponents of drilling the Noble Basin say it would destroy an area that is vitally important for deer, antelope, moose, bear and other wildlife, and radically alter a way of life for people who live there or who depend on the area for hunting and other recreation.

Those who are battling PXP and urging the Forest Service to find a way out see what unbridled energy development can bring. Thousands of gas wells dot the lands near the town of Pinedale, and have turned a remote region of Wyoming into an industrial center, with huge impacts on wildlife and air quality.

The U.S. Forest Service is conducting a final environmental review of the gas drilling project.  If officials decide that tighter restrictions on drilling near existing roads apply, it’s possible that the PXP leases would be less valuable and could be bought out by those who want the Noble Basin preserved in its current wild state.

To find out more about this issue or to take action, visit the Sierra Club’s website or the Citizens for the Wyoming Range website.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Three Coal Trains Derailed Just in the Last Week

And more on the way?

New York City to Expand 20 MPH ‘Slow Zones’ to 13 Neighborhoods

What has begun in the Claremont section of the Bronx is now expanding over to new neighborhoods all over New York City.

GOP Doubles Down On ‘Pants On Fire’ Claims About Clean Energy That Fact Checkers Call ‘Ridiculous’

Once again, the clean energy industry is collateral damage in an election year war of words.

After being repeatedly called out by fact-checkers for straight-up lying in political ads attacking clean energy jobs, the GOP is doubling down on claims about the stimulus package that the Washington Post has called “ridiculous.”

The Republican National Committee just rolled out a new website that rehashes many of the party’s widely-debunked assertions that the President sent jobs overseas through the stimulus. Responding to the Obama campaign’s charges that Romney outsourced jobs while at the private equity firm Bain Capital, the GOP is attempting to weave an outsourcing story of its own — this one centered on clean energy jobs.

Even with 660,00 jobs supported by green buildings, 75,000 jobs in the wind industry, 100,000 jobs supported by the solar industry, and 155,000 jobs in the clean and efficient vehicle sector, the RNC is stepping up its claims that the Obama Administration hurt jobs through his promotion of clean energy in the stimulus package.

(Apparently, somebody forgot to send the RNC a copy of the Brookings Institution report showing that jobs in renewable energy grew by 8.3 percent during the height of the recession due to the stimulus.)

This latest RNC narrative is based almost entirely on fiction. As the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler points, out in his debunk of the RNC campaign:  “Most of the examples are ripped out of context, involve strange leaps of logic or are so minor that it’s barely worth paying attention.”

But the campaign itself — no matter how untruthful — is definitely worth paying attention to. It puts clean energy square in the GOP’s political cross hairs and will likely serve as key piece of Mitt Romney’s talking points.

In fact, at a campaign rally earlier this week, Romney repeated some of the RNC’s claims almost word-for-word, calling Obama an outsourcer by “putting money into solar and wind energy companies that make their products outside of the U.S.”

So what are the facts? The website provides more than two dozen “ripped out of context” examples of jobs being created overseas; however, it provides no documentation backing up them up. Only when you dig deep into the “Research Briefing” section of an alternative GOP website can you find the stories they reference.

It’s no wonder the citations were hidden. The stories they link to are either laughably inconsequential, contradictory, or completely outdated. Speaking to the Washington Post, here’s how one reporter described the RNC’s use of his previous investigative work on whether foreign products were being used for renewable energy projects being constructed in America:

“The RNC’s website does correctly cite some of the data we uncovered in the course of our investigation, however most of that reporting is over two years old and the RNC site presents just a snippet of what we found. The focus of our reporting was whether or not the Obama administration created as many jobs domestically as they promised they would — not on the question of whether there was “outsourcing” of jobs. I don’t think we saw anything that indicated the Obama administration pushed jobs overseas. What we found is that a large portion of the money from that program was given to foreign-owned companies to build wind farms here in the United States. We found those projects did create jobs here in the United States in construction and operation of those wind farms, but in many instances, the farms used turbines that may have been manufactured overseas. In many cases, manufacturers told us that domestically manufactured turbines were not available. When we last reported on the issue, we found that more and more domestic companies were getting involved, but I can’t say what the situation is today.”

In its breakdown of the campaign, The Washington Post rips down almost new every claim made in the campaign. It’s well worth checking out Glenn Kessler’s detailed analysis to see why he calls the narrative so “ridiculous.”

But there are a few other key points worth highlighting. If the Republican party has made a decision to aggressively target renewable energy in its political attacks, they need to answer a few questions.

1) Is the GOP opposing foreign investment to increase America’s competitiveness?

Oddly, the campaign laments that foreign companies invested in the U.S. market.

The stimulus package attracted a number of international companies that came to the U.S. to open manufacturing facilities and develop a variety of projects. Because America had a less mature clean energy market than other countries (mostly because of inconsistent policy support over the years), some companies outside the country set up American subsidiaries in order to take advantage of the stimulus grant program and build projects — supporting up to 75,000 jobs in the process. And as required by law, 100% of the projects that received investment tax credits through the stimulus were built in the United States.

That’s the exact opposite of outsourcing. That is drawing on new expertise and talent to help grow the nascent U.S. clean energy market and create domestic jobs. By criticizing this investment, are we saying that “America is closed for business” and that we don’t want foreign companies creating American jobs here? That’s how this campaign comes across.

2) Is the GOP now implying it doesn’t support free enterprise?

Some have been critical that companies developing projects under the stimulus were sourcing products from outside the U.S. These are legitimate concerns. However, in many cases, the products needed simply weren’t available within American borders or didn’t meet performance specifications — largely because our domestic manufacturing sector hadn’t scaled to the level needed.

Even though clean energy facilities under the grant program were all developed within U.S. borders, the GOP is now attacking companies for sourcing some products from outside the country due to cost, performance, or availability issues. But isn’t that just the free market at work? If a company can’t get something it needs one place, shouldn’t it go to where it can?

Even more stunning, the GOP campaign attacks General Electric, General Motors and First Solar for setting up manufacturing facilities in other countries. But none of these companies got a single dollar of stimulus money for these facilities; they were simply moving to where the markets demanded. By needlessly singling these companies out for attack, the GOP seems to be implying that the free market is a bad thing — but only when the narrative suits their political objectives.

3) Is the GOP prepared to sacrifice our role in a booming global industry in order to create fake scandals for short-term political gain?

Between 2004 and 2011, the global clean energy sector saw $1 trillion in investments. And last year, investments in clean energy surpassed investments in fossil fuels for the first time ever. But rather than try to capture the value from the next trillion dollars in global clean energy investments, the national Republican establishment only seems committed to turning the industry into a scandal.

Since the year-long Solyndra investigation turned up no evidence of political wrong doing, party leaders are attempting to create another false narrative about the clean energy industry. But their cover has been blown. Fact checkers have repeatedly called the claims in this new campaign “alarming” and “ultimately ridiculous.” They’ve also lamented the party’s narrative, saying “there is no excuse for these kinds of ads, which take facts out of context or simply invent them.”

Indeed, there is no way around it. This latest campaign is laughably false. Even so, we can expect party leaders to continue hammering away at these talking points until November. Whenever these talking points are used, journalists and voters need to remember how ludicrously false they are.

Konstantin Othmer’s Top 10 Things About His Tesla Model S Electric Car (Video)

This playful video tour was made by Konstantin Othmer, one of the first people to get a Tesla Model S electric sedan (he's got the Signature edition with all the bells and whistles).

GE Partners with Paypal to Make EV Charging Payment Simpler

Making paying for electricity at EV charging stations as easy and "friction free" as possible is very important. Not only does it removes a barrier to adoption for would-be electric car owners, but it will also mean that more stations will be built.

FedEx to Test 100% Electric Nissan e-NV200

FedEx will test the Nissan e-NV200 electric van in the Yokohama area in Japan starting this month. FedEx has already conducted a trial in Europe last winter, and hopefully this one will be enough to convince them to use more EVs.

Throwaway Economy Headed for Junk Heap of History

The challenge is to re-evaluate the materials we consume and the way we manufacture products so as to cut down on waste.

We Need a No More Oil Spills Act, Not a No More Solyndras Act

Florida representative Cliff Stearns needs some clarificaton on what will actually protect taxpayers' interests. Hint, it's definitely not taking on a government loan program that's been largely successful.

House Committee Votes To Take Food Stamps Away From Millions Of Low-Income Americans

Today, the House Agriculture Committee approved the final version of the 2012 farm bill, complete with its draconian cuts for families struggling to put food on the table. The proposed bill cuts $35 billion from the federal food and nutrition budget, about $16.5 billion of which come from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps.

The cuts work by eliminating “categorical eligibility,” which provides assistance to families whose assets or income put them slightly above the technical line for SNAP eligibility. Repealing categorical eligibility means that between two and three million Americans will lose access to food stamps and roughly 280,000 children will drop out of their automatic enrollment in the free lunch program at school. So the House bill has anti-hunger advocates up in arms:

“With the economy being in such bad shape, depriving that many people of nutritional assistance is going to have a devastating effect,” said Eric Olsen, [Feeding Hunger]’s senior vice president of government relations and public policy.

One needs simply to look to the story of Dorothy Moon, a stay-at-home mother in Texas who depends on food stamps to feed her six children while her male partner looks for new work, to understand Olsen’s point. Of course, some in the GOP want to ignore “sob stories” about the plight of people who struggle to put food on the table.

SNAP assistance saved five million American from poverty in 2010 and halved the number of children in poverty in 2011.

How Car Sharing is Taking Over Berlin

Robert Llewellyn explores Berlin's high tech systems for car sharing in an urban environment. He thinks he may have seen the future of mobility.

Crowdsourcing, Limited Partnerships and Other Tools for Financing our Clean-Energy Future

At Clean Edge, we spend a great deal of time looking at innovative policy, business, and financing models that can support the broad and steady growth of solar, wind, energy efficiency, green buildings, and other clean-tech sectors. And in many ways, we believe it's no longer really an issue of technology development. Costs continue to come down across the clean-tech value chain while the industry, along with the products it offers, expands and matures.

Protecting Cleantech Software

Implementation and functionality of most new technology now depends on software. Software for renewable energy technology, often referred to as 'CleanTech', is no exception to this rule. For example, a consumer considering participation in a feed-in tariff (FiT) scheme will want to know if their property is in fact suitable for solar generation before committing time and money. Consumer software products have been developed to simulate location-specific suitability. One application, for example, allows users to locate their home on Google Maps, insert symbols representing the envisaged location of the panels and additional data such as the pitch of their roof and suspected sources of shadows, following which the software estimates the generation of solar electricity.

Offshore Wind Farms in US Waters Would Generate Both US and Foreign Maritime Jobs

With no offshore wind energy farms yet built off U.S. coastlines, various states over the last few years have proposed offshore wind energy legislation as a future investment in renewable energy as well as a vehicle for American job creation. The immediate future of U.S. offshore wind farms may depend on whether Congress renews certain tax credit and federal loan guarantee programs. In the event that offshore wind farms move forward, it is likely that both U.S. maritime and foreign maritime workers will be involved in construction and maintenance.

Wind Turbines Waste Much Less Energy than Fossil Fuels

Wind energy opponents who say that producing electricity using the power of the wind is not efficient would do well to take a look at a new graphic published on the Guardian’s data blog using UK Government data. ‘Up in smoke: how energy efficient is electricity produced in the UK?’ shows that thermal sources of electricity – gas, coal, nuclear, was