Mike G Posts

Solar energy is booming: More than half a million U.S. homes and businesses have gone solar, some 200,000 in just the last two years alone. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that in the first half of 2014, a new solar installation went up every 3.2 minutes. That scares the hell out of the electric utilities, who have been fighting rooftop solar tooth and nail. Now, the utilities are employing a different tactic: they're simply trying to co-opt the rooftop solar business altogether.

Uncertainty over the future of the wind production tax credit and the solar investment tax credit — and Congressional inaction on both matters — could pose a serious challenge to development in the renewable energy sector. Two new “technology roadmap” reports recently released by the International Energy Agency show that the sun could be the single biggest source of energy, providing nearly 30 percent of the world's electricity by 2050, but warned that “clear, credible and consistent signals from policy makers” are required to make it happen.

According to bombshell reports by the AP and Houston Chronicle, traffic fatalities are on the decline countrywide ... except for Texas and a handful of other states where truck traffic from fracking has changed the numbers game.

Not only will it lead to more costly and catastrophic events like wildfires, droughts, and floods, but delaying action on climate change will in and of itself constitute a missed opportunity to bolster the US economy, according to a new report.

Southern Hemisphere ocean temperatures have been rising much more quickly than previously thought, so much so that global ocean warming may have been underestimated by as much as 24 - 55 percent, according to a new study. Oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat created by global warming from greenhouse gas emissions, so it has long been suspected that a slow down in the increase of global surface temperatures since 2005 was due to the oceans absorbing that excess manmade heat.

Two oil companies planning to drill in remote Arctic waters, Shell and ConocoPhillips, are pleading with U.S. regulators not to make them follow new guidelines proposed by the Interior Department that would require the companies to keep emergency spill response equipment close at hand and prohibit the use of chemical dispersants.

China is moving to institute a cap-and-trade system that would begin to limit the powerhouse's coal emissions. The US is stuck with a GOP that doesn't even believe in climate change, and whose president must go it alone as best he can.

A new study has found that people living in close proximity to a fracked natural gas well are twice as likely to suffer upper-respiratory or skin problems.
The study,

Environmental Entrepeneurs, an organization devoted to promoting green jobs and job creation, released a Labor Day report highlighting the ever-growing number of clean energy jobs out there helping to drive the economy.

Systemic problems led to the failure of a gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, and a subsequent explosion that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. The city's mayor has called for the ouster of key officials who negligently avoided fixing the problem at the behest of the energy industry they were supposed to regulate.

Fracking is bad in a variety of ways, but nowhere is its impact more profound than on the drought-devastated state of California. The oil industry wastes water that the state desperately needs, and leaves behind pollution that infects anything remaining behind.

Big Oil's money worked. Spending $1.5M on state senators got them the votes to sink a moratorium on fracking in California.

Californians are taking action on their own after state legislators failed to push through a fracking moratorium Thursday. Localities are pushing through their own restrictions even with industry – and industry-funded politicians – digging their feet in.

California's oil industry has consistently proclaimed shale-extracted crude as a panacea on the road to energy independence. Well, they've had to downgrade estimates by as much as 96%, a boon to environmentalists who've decried the costly, dirty extraction process.

A new report out from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) shows that solar power came an incredibly long way toward asserting itself as a key part of the U.S. energy mix last year. The U.S. now has a total of 12.1 gigawatts of photovoltaic installations and 918 megawatts of concentrating solar power, enough to power 2.2 million homes.

When one of its Pennsylvania natural gas pipelines exploded recently, Chevron did what any responsible company would – give those affected some free pizza. Who needs assurances about your health and safety when you've got delicious, spicy pepperoni?

As the race to exploit the vast amount of oil in the Monterey Shale heats up, environmentalists are warning that the state of California's lax oversight of the controversial oil production practice known as fracking could lead to another major disaster. Last October, the AP revealed that offshore fracking is occurring much more frequently than California officials are aware. More than 200 fracking projects were discovered to have taken place over the preceding two decades in waters near Long Beach, Seal Beach, and Huntington Beach.

Coming just a week after Canada’s foreign minister traveled to Washington, D.C., and called on the Obama administration to make a decision on Keystone XL pipeline, the results of a new paper's analysis contradict the oil industry’s claims that the safety of pipelines can be ensured through existing measures. According to the Wall Street Journal, which looked at data on 251 spills that occurred on private property, the industry's pipeline monitoring equipment was the first to detect a leak in just 19.5 percent of incidents.

Last Friday, a train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale in North Dakota was traveling through a rural part of Alabama when 20 of its cars derailed and exploded. Firefighters left 11 of the cars to burn themselves out overnight. Flames were reportedly shooting 300 feet into the air. This was not the only train carrying crude oil that derailed in recent memory. It wasn’t even the only train derailment last week.

There’s a lot of money at stake for oil companies that want to frack California’s Monterey Shale, so it’s no wonder Big Oil is spending big to forestall any new environmental regulations from biting into profits.