Stacy Feldman's Climate Chronicles

There is bad news and good news for the Marshall Islands, which have been thrown into a state of economic emergency from sharp increases in barrel prices.

The bad news is that there's only enough diesel to power the island until the end of August. Worse: Its national power utilities are dead broke, facing a $20 million shortfall -- 20 percent of the national budget.

The good news is that President Litokwa Tomeing has declared a state of emergency that could supercharge the adoption of short- and long-term clean energy and efficiency measures.

The full declaration is here. Some key parts:

As the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lifts its absurd moratorium on new solar projects on public lands -- a result of industry and public outcry -- it’s worth remembering that five years ago the BLM was campaigning for solar.

Yep. The BLM released a report in February 2003, arguing for heavy development of solar power and other renewables on public lands in the West. Straight from the agency's 2003 release:

Increasing our domestic development of renewable energy sources, will help to reduce our dependency on foreign sources of energy...As the report demonstrates, public lands have abundant opportunities for renewable energy development.

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Dynegy Inc. has the most proposed coal-fired power plants of any company in the nation. And it’s just been dealt a heavy blow.

A Superior Court judge in Georgia has ruled to kill the construction of Dynegy's proposed 1,200-megawatt, $2 billion coal plant on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

Longleaf was its name. And it was slated to be Georgia’s first new coal-fired power plant in 20 years.

But for now, it's dead, on account of Dynegy’s failure to do anything to limit the facility's CO2 emissions.

Historic.

The damage estimates are starting to roll in from the Midwest floods, and they’re staggering.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has put crop-related losses at around $7 billion -- and rising. Iowa alone accounts for more than half of that amount.

Add property damages of $1.5 billion to the total hit, and you arrive at a preliminary flood damage estimate of $8.5 billion.

That's a very low-ball number. And yet, it already puts the Midwest floods of ’08 at number two on the list of the most expensive non-hurricane flooding catastrophes in the US, ever. WunderBlog has that story.

Read it. And when you do, keep this in mind: Despite media neglect, global warming -- in part -- has caused the treacherous rains that have spawned those costly floods, as Climate Progress and many others have studiously catalogued.

Finally some news of an offshore wind power deal in the US that doesn’t end in a project-stomping NIMBY victory.

Bluewater Wind has secured a buyer, Delmarva Power, for part of the electricity that it's planning to generate from its long-awaited offshore wind park, 13 miles off the coast of Delaware.

The two companies signed a 25-year contract for the sale of up to 200 megawatts this week. (The $1.6 billion project could eventually produce as much as 600 megawatts -- enough electricity to power 110,000 Delaware households.)

The turbines are expected to go online in 2012. When that happens, Delaware, the "First State," will become home to America's very first offshore wind farm.

About time.

The Economist touches on something big in its cover story on clean energy this week: "geothermal could be hot."

From the piece:

"The recoverable heat in rock under the United States is the equivalent of 2,000 years-worth of the country’s current energy consumption."

Yes! The MIT researchers that crunched those numbers have been beating this drum for a while. (And so have we.)

And now for a related and interesting progress report.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service have just initiated a public comment period on their draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for geothermal leasing all over the American West, including Alaska.

The US corn ethanol industry is struggling, now that Midwest floods have washed out millions of acres of prime cropland, sending corn prices soaring and ethanol profits falling. If this statement by Citigroup is anything to go by, then it could be even worse than feared.

As quoted in MarketWatch:

As a result of the rapid margin deterioration, nearly 120 small to midsize ethanol producers "will be shut down over the next few months," said David Driscoll, an analyst at Citigroup, in a written comment released Thursday. There are currently about 160 ethanol plants in the United States, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

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Here’s the latest on America’s solar energy potential from a well-reasoned new report by Clean Edge and Co-op America:

Solar could become ubiquitous as with earlier semiconductor-based revolutions.

Right now, solar makes up just one-tenth of one percent of the US total energy supply. But that could jump to ten percent by 2025 with a total investment of about $30 billion a year and a sharp turn in thinking from the nation’s utilities, according to the new roadmap to a solar future, Utility Solar Assessment (USA) Study (pdf).

It’s practical counsel when you consider that the utility industry spent $70 billion last year on traditional power plants and distribution. From the study:

The Oil Drum has posted stunning graphs on global cement production from the US Geological Survey's (USGS) latest cement data. Two of them are after the jump.

Take note of China.

In 2007, it produced 50 percent of all the cement used in the world, up from 42.5 percent in 2006.

Of the 1.3 billion tons that China manufactured last year, it used over 97 percent for the nation's own building boom, and exported the rest, around 33 million tons. The Olympics account for some of that growth. But not all.

As an economic cure for America, it’s something of an unknown quantity. But energy efficiency could deliver 1.5 million new jobs by 2030 -- if Washington doesn’t botch the opportunity.

That’s the major finding of a new report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

And it comes straight from the experience of the US labs of climate policy innovation: the states.

Many have stepped into the national void on energy efficiency and have released their findings for the whole world to see.