July 9, 2008

Summer is here and the mercury is rising. It's not just the heat. It's also the level of harmful pollutants and specifically mercury.

Mercury is an insidious villain, creating dangers for local ecosystems and any small children and pregnant women who might eat contaminated fish. Technologies will improve and utilities will respond. But the attention given to mercury emissions now has prompted many such companies to implement best available technologies at their power plants - tools that have the potential to cut such pollutants by 50-90 percent.

June 20, 2008

America's growth spurt will require more energy. But economic development and environmental progress do not need to be in conflict with one another.

Indeed, the country is not helpless when it comes to fighting the effects of climate change, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. In fact, metropolitan areas offer greater energy and carbon efficiencies than less populated regions, in large measure because of residential density and good public transport.

June 16, 2008

It's the break heard around the world. And it's happening in Canada, where the two most populated provinces have eschewed a plan by the federal government and are instead developing their own ideas to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The premiers of Ontario and Quebec say that they are compelled to create mandatory standards whereby industry would have to cut its global warming pollution and use 1990 as a baseline by which to measure results. That runs counter to one submitted by the current Canadian national government that would rely on a "floating cap" but one in which it says greenhouse gases would be cut by 20 percent by 2020.

June 13, 2008

Regulatory pressure is bringing about the improvements. But the bottom line is that major utilities with coal-fired operations are investing in modern pollution control equipment.

While it may not be the ideal solution, it is a step forward. The country is now grappling with how to add generation capacity and specifically the role of coal-fired plants. Pressure is building for those generators to be cleaned up and as a result, industry analysts expect that most such facilities will add scrubbing equipment by the end of the decade or they will shut down. While the costs will be passed on to ratepayers, the plants would produce cleaner energy and the investments in technology would spawn new jobs.

June 11, 2008

Clean coal is an imperative. Some breakthrough technologies to achieve that goal now exist while others are years away. One such concept is to use waste carbon emissions from power plants to grow algae, which is subsequently converted to energy and because those releases would re-cycled, carbon dioxide emissions would be cut in half.

Views range from enthusiastic to reserved. It's a sensible alternative but one that will not end the debate over which fuel sources will best meet the global community's future energy needs. In fact, if the theory can be scaled up and used at power plants, the subsequent reduced emissions might even encourage the use of coal.