Every five years, the federal government is required by law to update its leasing program for offshore oil and natural gas development. On November 8th, Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar announced the government’s proposed plan for offshore oil drilling for the next five years (2012-2017). The new plan can be summed up pretty easily: [...]
I wanted to share my first impression after driving the Nissan LEAF for the past couple of weeks. While it may be quixotic to think we can ever truly drive “guilt free,” the zero-emissions LEAF certainly is a step in the right direction. By charging the LEAF at non-peak hours to level off energy load demands [...]
Last week, Simon Mahan attended the American Wind Energy Association/Offshore Wind Development Coalition’s conference on offshore wind energy in Baltimore, Md. This is the final of a series of three blogs from the conference. Read the previous posts: Southern Jobs for Offshore Wind Energy and Overwhelming Support May Not Be Enough for Offshore Wind. As I [...]
UPDATE 1: It has been confirmed that the tar balls that washed ashore during Tropical Storm Lee are, in fact, oil from the BP oil spill. UPDATE 2: The Coast Guard Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation Team has released its final report on the causes of the Gulf oil spill. Some of BP, Transocean and Halliburton’s actions [...]
This post by David Jenkins originally appeared at Frum Forum and has been reposted here with their permission. Jenkins is Vice President for Government and Political Affairs for Republicans for Environmental Protection. On a recent campaign stop in Florida, Michele Bachmann waded into a political swamp by saying that she would drill in the Everglades [...]
Earlier this year in the State of the Union, President Obama implored Congress to “eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies,” noting that “they’re doing just fine on their own.” Congress has now made two half-hearted attempts to end these taxpayer-funded subsidies to large oil companies. Last night, United States [...]
The 1 year anniversary of the nation’s worst oil spill was observed just two weeks ago but little has been done to improve offshore drilling safety measures to ensure another accident of similar magnitude does not happen again. Nevertheless, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed legislation introduced by Rep. Doc Hastings to speed up [...]
The current methods of producing and consuming energy in the U.S. have the largest environmental impact of anything that we as citizens do on a day-to-day basis. I believe a meaningful Earth Day cannot exist without having a “Clean Energy Day.” In the South, we’ve recently experienced two of the largest environmental disasters in the [...]
Co-authored by Simon Mahan and Toni Reale It seems like yesterday when the airwaves were filled with the horrifying news that an exploratory oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven men and spewing unknown quantities of crude into Gulf waters. The explosion happened on April 20th 2010 and just two days [...]
On February 28th, the Obama Administration issued its first deepwater drilling permit since the Gulf of Mexico disaster in April of last year. Noble Energy Inc. has been granted permission to continue drilling their deepwater well ( 70 miles southeast of Venice, La.) that they started before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The issuing of this [...]