power

Did President Obama do a flip-flop when he opened up vast swaths of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil drilling? It depends on how far back you want to go in the President's record. In the Senate he supported efforts to limit offshore drilling. But as a presidential candidate he came around to accepting at least some offshore drilling as a way to build consensus on the energy issue.

Catharine Richert brings us this analysis for the worthwhile politifact.com website run by the St. Pete Times. Her post is worth a read.

Flip-flop or no, though, it's one of what seem like increasingly more common Obama decisions on the environment that could easily have been made by the George W. Bush administration (but probably not  by the George H.W. Bush team.) Example: On Monday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it was going with a Bush-era interpretation of the Clean Air Act that delays a crackdown on regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources such as power plants. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, this will allow construction of another 50 coal-fired plants.

Other thoughts in the aftermath of Obama's drilling decision:

+ I couldn't resist retweeting David Roberts of Grist.org:

"Imagine Obama banning offshore drilling in the vague hope that environmental groups might some day support his bill."

:>)

I've always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world -- you know, the "Live simply, that others may simply live"-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. It seems like a way for consumers who are feeling guilty about something -- say, those SUVs they drive -- to assuage their guilt by doing something that doesn't really hurt, like turning off the lights when leaving a room. And of course, we've seen how this mindset can backfire:

Jetstream Wind Inc. of New Mexico plans to build what it believes will be the first utility-scale, zero-emissions power plant to use electricity from wind, solar and other renewable energy sources to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would be stored, then used to generate enough electricity to power 6,000 homes and businesses, while the oxygen would be sold to the medical field and other secondary markets, Susan Montoya Bryan of the Associated Press reports.

Whether such a plant would ultimately be cost-effective way to produce fuel remains to be seen. "You have to start somewhere with a lot of these technologies and over time these things decline in costs," Mike Taylor, director of research and education at the Solar Electric Power Association in Washington D.C. told the Associated Press.

The privately financed 10-megawatt plant is being built in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and the company eventually hopes to build two more plants for American Indian pueblos and one in Hawaii.

The National Security Agency is looking to build a massive $2 billion computer center at the Camp Williams military reservation in Utah, but critics worry it will drain energy needed by current power users, the Salt Lake Tribune's Matthew D. LaPlante reports. The NSA has already maxed out a power grid in Baltimore, and Utah officials are trying to figure out how they would accommodate such a power-hungry customer. The new facility would itself consume the equivalent of the electricity needed to power all the homes in Salt Lake City.