Washington — President Obama may have delayed action on immigration until after November’s midterm elections, hoping to avoid political fallout. But that leaves another hot-button topic for critics in Congress to target: climate change.
It’s another issue on which Obama has sidestepped Congress to the praise of his supporters, but to the scorn of his critics – both Democratic and Republican – on Capitol Hill.
A draft of a new UN report seen by The New York Times warns that our planet is at risk of "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts" if the world's governments don't quickly alter their course and do more to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. The report, drafted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that we are already nearing a temperature at which the ice sheet covering Greenland is expected to begin melting — an unstoppable process that could raise global sea levels by 23 feet and bring other extremes of climate including heat waves and torrential rain.
The switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation could harm power reliability in Ohio and surrounding states, according to the group that manages the transmission grid for the 13-state region.
PJM Interconnection said in a new white paper that the “rapid transition” as more utilities retire coal plants and turn to domestic shale gas causes concern about the reliability of the region’s generation fleet.
During the dog days of summer (which haven’t been all that doggy in the Northeast this year) it’s not very popular to sit and speculate about the winter months ahead, but the people responsible for keeping the lights – and the heat – turned on have to do it. One of these folks is Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL Analytics, and he’s looking ahead with some trepidation. Joe is reading the meteorological tea leaves and sees the potential for another round of heavy snowfall and crippling cold temperatures coming our way.
FRANKFURT, Aug 14 (Reuters) - Germany's RWE reported a 40-percent plunge in first-half profits, blaming loss-making power plants and warning that power supplies were under threat unless an ongoing crisis in Europe's energy sector was fixed.
Environmental groups in the Tennessee Valley are on the verge of winning their third major battle against TVA's coal-fired power plants.
But anti-coal activists are still fighting a larger war against fossil fuel generation of any type by the federal utility.
A dozen coal-reliant states have sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to derail proposed rules designed to cut greenhouse gases from existing coal-fired power plants, the single largest domestic source of emissions that drive climate change.
The filing, the first from a coalition of states, follows a lawsuit brought six weeks ago by the country's largest privately held coal mining company, Murray Energy Corp.
