February 01, 2010

As President Obama rounds the corner and heads into the second year of his administration, he is discovering what nearly all of his predecessors have -- that voters become disenchanted during the midterm and tend to elect more of the opposition.

With that comes the challenge of how to enact what he and his supporters have determined to be the country's greatest priorities. To that end, Obama has not forsaken the issues to which he got elected. Instead, he has chosen to extend a hand to Republicans and Independents and offer them a chance to influence the course of history.

November 25, 2009

Although the electric industry has endorsed the concept of cap-and-trade as the least onerous approach to carbon regulation, at least one major company endorses it with unalloyed enthusiasm. Exelon not only supports the idea, it stated in a second-quarter conference call to analysts, which it posted to its Web site, that it expects to see a "$1.1 billion and growing annual upside to Exelon revenues from implementation of Waxman-Markey." Is that number real or simply wishful thinking? Does Exelon know something that's escaped the rest of us?

Actually, if one makes a couple of assumptions, the potential earnings boost is very real. Here's how it works. Exelon's 17 nuclear plants, the largest nuclear fleet in the country, generated just over a record 132 million megawatts-hours of power in 2007. That's fact. Assumption number one: The Senate follows the House and passes an unchanged version of the Waxman-Markey bill.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 18, 2009

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is announcing new requirements for audio/video (AV) products to earn the Energy Star label. AV products meeting EPA's new, more stringent specification will help protect the environment and reduce energy costs because they will be up to 60 percent more efficient than conventional models.

If all AV products sold in the United States met the new Energy Star requirements, Americans would save more than $1 billion in energy costs annually while reducing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of more than 1 million vehicles every year.

September 30, 2009

It's a first step. But it's a big one. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has signed a final rule to establish a mandatory greenhouse gas reporting system that it says would cover about 85 percent of all such emissions.

The thinking is that the formation of such a registry requires industrial concerns to not just tabulate their heat-trapping emissions but to also consider ways to reduce them. In effect, what gets measured gets managed. That, in turn, would make it more feasible to enact national policy that would require cuts in those releases and could like facilitate the implementation of a cap-and-trade system.

August 31, 2009

The Enron saga still lives. Elements of the so-called "Enron loophole" remain intact -- provisions that that some say distort markets and drive up commodity prices.

The uncertainty in oil and natural gas markets, along with the country's financial morass, has prompted legislative changes. But the Obama administration wants those commodities that are bought and sold through trading platforms to be subject to even stricter oversight. The administration's Commodity Futures Trading Commission is considering regulations that would diminish the power of those exchanges and set limits on the number of energy positions that traders take.