Energy

On Capitol Hill, the ship of state is so bereft of rudder and sail that the crew is jumping overboard. The latest to abandon ship is Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who minced no words about the dysfunctional Congress he is choosing to leave.

Forget for a moment about health care and financial reform. On national energy and environmental issues, which have been stalled in the congressional queue, we have a critical national security threat, a danger to public health and welfare, and national policy that encourages American families to inadvertently fund terrorists.

Those are among the reasons the paralyzing partisanship on Capitol Hill is so serious a dereliction of duty.

So what can the president of the United States do? Quite a lot if he’s willing to use the executive powers he’s been given by the Constitution, the courts and past Congresses.

If the U.S. government changes nothing about its approach toward energy and global warming, the nation's energy consumption will grow 14 percent by 2035. Fossil fuels will retain a relatively high share of that total, and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy will increase by 8.7 percent.

Those are the latest long-term projections described by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency on Monday.

The findings highlight a need for federal regulations if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced as Congress is considering and members of the international community are demanding in Copenhagen this week. The findings also suggest that state efforts to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use will begin to pay off.

Wind power's tiny footprints don't stop at carbon emissions. A new analysis of the impacts of various energy sources on human health and the environment finds that wind also has the smallest imprint on another, rarely considered but important aspect: land.

Wind power's ecological footprint is so small — a million times smaller than ethanol's — that if all the cars driven in the United States were battery-electric, they could be fueled by wind turbines whose total land footprint, not counting spacing in between, takes up less than 1.2 square miles, Stanford University environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson found.

To fuel the same number of battery-electric vehicles with cellulose ethanol would require an amount of land equivalent to eight Californias – literally a million times more land and equivalent to the amount of land harvested in the U.S. in 2003.

The European Union has pledged to have 12 demonstration carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) power plants -- so-called "clean coal" -- up and running by 2015 and the technology fully commercialized by 2020.

But there is not a single utility-scale CCS plant now functioning in Europe, nor on the planet, and not one on the horizon. On top of that, some experts say EU dollars have all but dried up for funding the overpriced, pie-in-the-sky fossil fuel "fix."

Cloudy forecast? Yes. But it's way too premature to write off "clean coal" on the continent, because even as the economy crumbles, projects press on. A full reality check on the state of CCS technology in the EU follows, courtesy of an analysis by global research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has made a new projection of world energy to 2030 and finds that "nothing short of an energy revolution" is needed to end "patently unsustainable" trends in global energy supply and consumption.

The report, World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2008, assumes that no new government policies on energy and climate are introduced from now until 2030. The foreboding forecast:

The following two charts illustrate the impact Senator McCain's energy plan would have on oil and electricity supply over the next 22 years. The red sliver on the first chart shows what 45 new nuclear plants would add to the nation's electricity supply. The yellow sliver on the second chart shows what offshore drilling would add to the nation's oil supply.

The charts were created by Architecture 2030, based on data from US Energy Information Administration, the most authoritative source of energy statistics in the nation.

Barack Obama unveiled his energy plan in Lansing today, the capital of the state of Michigan, primary home of the US auto industry.

There are two elements in particular of Obama's energy plan that deserve special attention for the healing touch they apply: to combat vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the ailing US auto industry.

And lord knows they -- and this nation -- need a healing touch.