Green Options

Chances are, if you run a major polluting company, you’re not reading cleantechnica. But you never know. So here’s my advice, based on my experience writing about energy; gathered into one easy quick read for the non-eco reader, on how a polluting company can benefit from the new energy bill requirements to cut carbon emissions.

We can’t expect much from the oil industry, but Greenpeace’s newest finding is as ugly as it gets.

In a forthcoming paper, Oxford physicist Myles Allen says that class action lawsuits against oil companies for damages brought by severe weather may soon be possible.

Delivering quite a blow to both Gordon Brown and Britain, BP has dumped its plans to build out wind farms and other renewable projects in Britain for projects in the United States.

After much arm wrestling, the Senate came to an agreement on energy tax breaks which are set to expire later this year. Both Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), of the Senate Finance Committee, made the announcement on Tuesday.

The tax package will provide $17 billion in renewable energy tax breaks. It will also adjust the alternative minimum tax, extend tax credits for children and create several business tax cuts. It will also set aside $7 billion in tax relief for those affected by recent floods and hurricanes. The bill extends the solar and wind investment tax credit for eight years, and the production tax credit for biomass and hydropower for up to two years.

T. Boone Pickens, billionaire Texas oil man, has been pushing his come-to-Jesus revelations in television — and YouTube — commericals lately. Which is to say, he’s figured out there’s money to be made, and an energy independence to be had, in alternative energies.

Some may question Pickens’ motivations and his methods of doing business with the Pickens Plan. I admit I could learn more about those aspects of Pickens. But as I do so, I’m writing now of my early impressions of the man, and why I am glad to see his face on T.V.

Nothing is more precious to general America than money. So money, profits, wealth accumulation, etc. has to be part of the process of converting people from any one way of life to any other way of life. Sense and science just aren’t enough for a significant, influential, voting portion of the public.

Big Oil, Big Money, Big Slap in the Face.

Unfortunately, I fear that slap won’t register properly with enough people in the status quo, those who cling to oil and more oil as if it’s the only way forward.

During a commercial break from MSNBC’s coverage of the final night of the Democratic National Convention held in Denver, the American Petroleum Institute, the trade organization for the Oil and Natural Gas Industry, ran a spot touting domestic oil and gas reserves that Democrats are keeping us Americans from reaching.

The movie title Gas Hole likely conjures varied humorous, if not-quite-sure-where-this-movie- is-headed, ideas in the minds of prospective viewers.

Maybe then it is highly suitable that the term came from the angelic mind of a child, simply trying to put a term to that hole-thingy where we insert gas pump nozzles to fuel our cars.

Suitable – and an unwittingly appropriate description of what has been happening in recent decades of oil pricing and auto manufacturing.

In Gas Hole , the girl’s uttering of the name that became the film’s title is one of the few that breaks the movie’s queasy sense of tension. It is an otherwise mind-boggling documentary of the history of oil prices, the attempts to develop alternative fuels and the related efforts of government and corporate interests.

The discomforting questions…