Category Archives: Energy

(February 20, 2009) During President Barack Obama’s visit to Canada this week, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground. Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too. Carbon capture has only one virtue: It solves short-term political problems for both leaders. Continue reading →

(September 13, 2008) The public debate on oil sands fails to recognize that restoration is possible and not that expensive. Alberta’s oil sands projects are ugly. Their tailings ponds pockmark the northern Alberta wilderness. Their open pit mines scar the land. This certifiable ugliness, the trademark symbol of oil sands destruction, has been the chief source of opposition to their development over the three decades that this rawest of resource industries has been in play. Continue reading →

(September 6, 2008) Russia’s energy supplies enabled their aggression, Canada’s supply could be the placating alternative. “When it comes to action over Georgia, Russia has the European Union over a barrel. In fact, 1.2 million barrels. That’s how much Russian crude is pumped westward every day down the Druzhba pipeline to fuel Europe’s economies.” Continue reading →

(August 13, 2008) Oil imports are destroying the U.S., say a rising tide of alarmists in the U.S., chief among them T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil man turned wind power developer. “It is a clear and growing threat to our national security, and our national economy,” he testified to the U.S. Senate.” It has to be stopped. We are on the verge of losing our Super Power status.” Continue reading →

(May 22, 2008) Senator John McCain’s nuclear stance comes under scrutiny this week from Carl Pope of the Sierra Club environmental group in his column for the Huffington Post blog. Pope asks how McCain can justify his double standard of opposing subsidies for solar power on one hand, and defending his support for an increase in subsidies for nuclear power, on the other. Continue reading →