Big Oil’s lust for tax loopholes « Climate Progress. By Climate Guest Contributor on January 31, 2011 at 3:35 pm "Big Oils lust for tax loopholes" Oil prices and profits rise while big oil defends its tax loopholes Daniel J. Weiss, in a CAP cross-post. Oil prices are high and rising at an alarming pace. After hitting a low of $38 per barrel in January 2009, the price of oil doubled to $76 per barrel just a year later.
The big five oil companies””BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell””made a total profit of nearly $1 trillion over the past decade. Their profits closely follow the rise in oil prices from 2005 to 2008, when the average price rose from $55 to $95 per barrel. These profits are likely to grow as oil prices continue to rise. And we can expect oil prices and profits to rise even more as a result of instability in the Middle East. ExxonMobil, for instance, will make nearly $9 million more every day that the oil price includes Friday’s spike. Rising oil prices aren’t the only factor driving bigger profits. . – Daniel J. Obama wil af van oliesubsidies: 'Dit is ons Spoetnik-moment'
De Nederlandse Publieke Omroep maakt gebruik van cookies. We maken een onderscheid tussen functionele cookies en cookies voor het beheer van webstatistieken, advertenties en social media. De cookies bevatten geen persoonsgegevens en zijn dus niet tot een individu te herleiden. Met de cookies voor advertenties en social media worden mogelijk door derden gegevens verzameld buiten de websites van de Nederlandse Publieke Omroep. Bij instellingen kun je aangeven deze cookies niet te accepteren. Door hiernaast op akkoord te klikken of door gebruik te blijven maken van deze website, geef je toestemming voor het plaatsen van cookies bij bezoek aan de websites van de Nederlandse Publieke Omroep. Waarom cookies? De Nederlandse Publieke Omroep maakt gebruik van cookies. Klik hier voor meer informatie over cookies en een overzicht van de sites waar je toestemming voor geldt.
Cookie instellingen aanpassen? Cookie-instellingen aanpassenAkkoord. Obama calls for massive boost in low-carbon energy, but doesn’t mention carbon, climate or warming. « Climate Progress. By Joe Romm on January 25, 2011 at 8:25 pm "Obama calls for massive boost in low-carbon energy, but doesn’t mention carbon, climate or warming. " “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment…. I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources.” The good news: Barack Obama delivered a powerful State of the Union speech advocating an aggressive clean energy strategy (text here). And he acknowledged a fundamental truth: advances in clean energy “will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling.”
The bad news: The President could not bring himself to utter the words “climate change” or “global warming.” The ‘ugly’ news: The phrase “clean energy” has been redefined. Some folks want wind and solar. Clean coal, of course, doesn’t exist, and it remains a big stretch to call nuclear ‘clean’, but at least this proposal moves the debate forward significantly. Social Media & Cleantech: Why the Latter is Not Using the Former. As I’ve written in the past about Sustainability and Social Media – the mix works well and should be embraced in particular by new companies looking to effectively connect and communicate with their stakeholders; prospects, clients, press & media, investors, competitors, industry & trade associations, just to name a few. Yet, to my surprise many are dismissing Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn as kid’s toys. Uncovering the reasons behind this trend, I turned to some experts to help understand why the adoption of social media (especially within the cleantech vertical) is so low.
Andrew Becker, Director of Business Development at LittleFoot Energy mentioned “difficulty in developing content compelling for customers.” He is also not sure if it reaches his target audience of C level executives, but maintains a social media presence, “to develop targeted recognition for our brand (but) less for landing new clients.” Several messages to the marketing Manager at @Comverge were not returned. US energy secretary warns of 'Sputnik moment' in green technology race | Environment. Steven Chu says the US must respond to the energy technology race much as it did to the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch in 1957.
Photograph: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images The United States faces a "Sputnik moment" in the global clean energy race and risks falling far behind advances by China and other countries, the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, warned today. Hours before the opening of the United Nations climate summit in Cancún, Chu said that the US urgently needed to invest in research and innovation – much as it responded to the Soviet Union's launch of the world's first space satellite in 1957 – if it wanted to remain a leader of innovation. "We face a choice today. Are we going to continue America's innovation leadership or are we going to fall behind? " Chu said in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington. Chu, a Nobel prize winner in physics, said his own career had been shaped by the orbit of that first space satellite. Chinese moves to limit mineral supplies sparks struggle over rare earths | Business.
The price of crucial minerals used in everything from smart phones to wind turbines and radar systems – and the shares of companies seeking to produce them – are soaring after Beijing slashed global supplies. China produces as much as 97% of the world's supply of so-called rare earth elements, but has drastically cut back exports, to the concern of foreign businesses and governments. The move has seen prices rise as much as nine-fold in a few months and given new impetus to mining firms across the world that have long been seeking to develop deposits. But analysts warn that stocks in such firms are reaching unrealistic highs in an investment surge which some compare to the dotcom bubble.
Despite their collective name, the 17 elements are not rare. According to the US geological survey, China has only about a third of the deposits and for many years a US mine run by Molycorp was the main global supplier. "If you don't get rare earths, you can't produce anything; that's why there's a panic. " NPS10: Netherlands Process Technology Symposium.
Cleantechnica. Green tech: is it the new dotcom? | Business | The Observer. Rising up next door to an Otis Spunkmeyer cookie bakery in a nondescript Texan business park, the hulking new factory did not look like an answer to the world's energy problems. But John Langdon, a director at Austin-based solar energy firm HelioVolt, believes that is exactly what it is. Talking over the buzz of power tools and clanging of hammers, he believes this place is part of an energy revolution that will change the face of the American - and the world's - economy. 'The whole transformation is inevitable. We are in the same place in solar energy now as the car industry was in 1901,' he says, without a trace of doubt in his Texan drawl.
Langdon's confidence is shared by many - and not just in solar energy. It is also an industry undergoing a massive financial boom as investors pour billions of speculative dollars into its start-up firms, similar in many ways to the dotcom revolution of the 1990s that gave the world Microsoft, Google and the internet revolution. World's biggest solar farm at centre of Portugal's amb.
From a distance the bizarre structures sprouting from the high Alentejo plain in eastern Portugal resemble a field of mechanical sunflowers. Each of the 2,520 giant solar panels is the size of a house and they are as technically sophisticated as a car. Their reflective heads tilt to the sky at a permanent 45 degrees as they track the sun through 240 degrees every day. The world's largest solar photovoltaic farm, generating electricity straight from sunlight, is taking shape near Moura, a small town in a thinly populated and impoverished region which boasts the most sunshine per square metre a year in Europe.
When fully commissioned later this year, the £250m farm set on abandoned state-owned land will be twice the size of any other similar project in the world, covering an area nearly twice the size of London's Hyde park. It is expected to supply 45MW of electricity each year, enough to power 30,000 homes. "We have to reduce our dependence on oil and gas," said Pinho. Top Bottom. Green Dragon: China’s Clean-Energy Revolution. Just because China is shuttering factories and shooing away cars in a last-ditch effort to clean up the air a week before the Summer Olympics begin doesn’t mean the country isn’t an environmental leader. At least, that’s the take from a new report due to be released next week by The Climate Group.
Trade winds (AP) The same year that China sprinted past the U.S. to become the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has also apparently sprinted into global leadership when it comes to clean-energy technologies. China has installed more renewable energy than any other country in the world, the report says. That contrasts with another big emitter (and Olympic medal favorite) that has had more difficulty passing clean-energy legislation. Of course, “renewable energy” includes hydropower, which in China means the Three Gorges Dam, a biggish undertaking which hasn’t won many environmental plaudits. News: Press Releases: Global Climate Change Response Can Spur $7. China's Clean Energy Performance Outpacing USA | SolveClima. Solar Inverter Firm Enphase Brings on Kleiner Perkins. The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has thrown its greentech weight (and funds) behind Enphase Energy, an early mover in the realm of microinverters for solar panels.
Enphase announced today it has closed a $63 million round that included Kleiner Perkins, pushing the 4-year-old company’s total fundraising upwards of $100 million for technology that converts the direct current (DC) flowing out of solar panels into the alternating current (AC) used by the electric grid. Enphase’s innovation is to do this conversion at the level of an individual solar panel, rather than at a large central conversion device where one failure can take down the whole system, and the weakest panel in a solar array can drag down the efficiency of better-performing panels.
Enphase, based in Petaluma, Calif., plans to use the new funds to speed up its product development and also begin a global expansion effort. 8 / 13Enphase-microinverter Cleantech Financing Trends 2010 and Beyond.