Deepwater Horizon Firm Gives Execs Safety Bonuses, with No Apparent Sense of Irony. By Jess Zimmerman, Grist, 4/4/11. “Transocean, the offshore drilling firm that ran the Deepwater Horizon rig, has given its top execs massive bonuses for having ‘the best year in safety performance in our company's history… Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate.’… Transocean said that executives would be getting a 3.8% raise, millions in stock options, and a cash bonus of 44.8 percent of their ‘target bonus opportunity. What’s that mean? Well, for the CEO (who’s not getting a bonus, having just gotten a promotion and a raise), ‘target bonus opportunity’ would be his full annual salary of $900,000, so he would be getting over $400,000.”

No to a New Tar Sands Pipeline. NYTimes editorial, 4/2/11. “Later this year, the State Department will decide whether to approve construction of a 1,700-mile oil pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast called Keystone XL. The underground 36-inch pipeline, built by TransCanada, would link the tar sands fields of northern Alberta to Texas refineries and begin operating in 2013. The department should say no…

“The environmental risks, for both countries, are enormous. The first step in the process is to strip-mine huge chunks of Alberta’s boreal forest… The E.P.A. estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands oil -- even without counting the destruction of forests that sequester carbon - are 82% greater than those produced by conventional crude oil. The project poses a major threat to water supplies on both sides of the border... Operations in Alberta have already created 65 square miles of toxic holding ponds, which kill migrating birds and pollute downstream watersheds, a serious matter for native communities… Political pressure to win swift approval has been building in Congress... From all of the evidence, Keystone XL is not only environmentally risky, it is unnecessary.”

Aircraft Contrails Stoke Warming, Cloud Formation. By Alister Doyle, Reuters, 3/29/11. “Aircraft condensation trails criss-crossing the sky may be warming the planet on a normal day more than the carbon dioxide emitted by all planes since the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903, a study said on Tuesday. It indicated that contrails -- white lines of Vapor left by jet engines -- also have big knock-on effects by adding to the formation of high-altitude, heat-trapping cirrus clouds as the lines break up. The findings may help governments fix penalties on planes' greenhouse gas emissions in a U.N.-led assault on climate change. Or new engines might be designed to limit Vapor and instead spit out water drops or ice that fall from the sky…

“But a key difference is that CO2 lingers for decades while warming from contrails quickly ends if flights are grounded, such as after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, or in Europe after last year's Icelandic volcano eruption. ‘You can get rid of contrails very quickly. You can't get rid of CO2 quickly,’ lead author Ulrike Burkhardt at DLR told Reuters... Olivier Boucher, of the Met Office Hadley Center in England…said the findings might bring changes in air traffic control, for instance diverting planes from regions or altitudes where air moisture was high and favored cirrus formation. But a problem was that any benefits of fewer contrails might be canceled out by higher fuel use on longer routes.”

San Onofre Wave Farm Idea Churns Up Concerns. By Tony Barboza, LATimes, 3/30/11. “The waves off San Onofre have for generations beckoned surfers and sport fishermen to a wild stretch of coastline in the shadow of domed nuclear reactors. Now, an Orange County entrepreneur wants to tap the power of that legendary surf in a novel but highly controversial plan to build one of the nation's first hydrokinetic wave farms. Federal energy regulators have given JD Products of Fountain Valley permission to begin a three-year study looking at the feasibility of installing thousands of ocean wave electricity generators a mile off San Onofre State Beach. The firm's general manager, Chong Hun Kim, said he chose the site because it is close to transmission lines that serve the San Onofre nuclear power plant…

“Environmental groups, which are broadly supportive of renewable energy projects, said putting the devices in the waters of San Onofre could harm marine life and potentially mar the view from the coastline. Surfers are worried it would dampen waves and alter seafloor terrain along a stretch of coast famed for its surf breaks. Sport-fishing groups said a wave farm could block off favored waters for sand bass, bonito and barracuda fishing.”

Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril. By Ken Belson and Hiroko Tabuchi, NYTimes, 3/ 29/11. “After workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan’s crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control… But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects…

“The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its “feed and bleed” strategy of cooling the reactor’ fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources. That cooling strategy… has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere… making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work… The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima… containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research [IEER], based in Takoma Park, Md.”

Renewing Support for Renewables. By Nancy Folbre, NYTimes, 3/28/11. “The biggest positive result of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi could be renewed public support for the development of renewable energy technologies. Many influential policy makers, including President Obama, continue to insist that we must expand nuclear power to help meet our energy needs. But plenty of experts disagree… renewable energy sources (including hydropower and biofuels) already account for almost the same share of total energy consumption in the United States as nuclear power… The cost per kilowatt hour of generating electricity from wind and solar power has declined steadily in recent years and is projected to decline further… The cost of nuclear power, by contrast, has increased, even without factoring in the huge social costs imposed by accidents... In Nuclear Power: Climate Fix or Folly, Amory Lovins, a physicist with the Rocky Mountain Institute, and two colleagues argued that expanded nuclear power does not represent a cost-effective solution to global warming and that investors would shun it were it not for generous government subsidies lubricated by intensive lobbying efforts…

“Can wind, water and solar power be scaled up in cost-effective ways to meet our energy demands, freeing us from dependence on both fossil fuels and nuclear power? Yes, they can, say two highly respected scientists, Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark A. Delucchi of the University of California, Davis. In 2009 they published A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables in Scientific American. The article persuasively addresses a number of concerns, such as the worldwide spatial footprint of wind turbines, the availability of scarce materials needed for manufacture of new systems, the ability to produce reliable energy on demand and the average cost per kilowatt hour. A more detailed and updated technical analysis can be found in a two-part article (see Part I [PDF, 16 pp] and Part II , [PDF, 21 pp] recently published in the journal Energy Policy)…

“The proven dangers of nuclear power amplify the economic risks of expanding reliance on it. Indeed, the stronger regulation and improved safety features for nuclear reactors called for in the wake of the Japanese disaster will almost certainly require costly provisions that may price it out of the market. The role of the market, however, is small relative to political battles over relative levels of subsidy to fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewable energy. While both the fossil fuel and nuclear power industries are dominated by large companies with considerable political clout, renewable energy is a more decentralized, small-business-oriented sector that often finds itself outmaneuvered on Capitol Hill.

“As Professors Jacobson and Delucchi put it, ‘The barriers to a 100% conversion to wind, water and solar power worldwide are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic.’”

~ Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.