Published on April 5th, 2008
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British Columbia will be the first in North America to institute a comprehensive carbon tax on nearly all fossil fuels. It’s a groundbreaking move that could prove the feasibility of taxing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Beginning July 1st, 2008, businesses and residents of British Columbia will be taxed $10 per metric ton of carbon emitted by fuels such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel. The tax will increase yearly by $5 per ton to $30 per ton in 2012, at which point the government will reevaluate the tax rate.
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Published on February 15th, 2008
Yesterday the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog put up an excited post about a Los Alamos National Laboratory plan to convert CO2 into truly greenhouse-neutral synthetic gasoline and ethanol via “an electrochemical process.” Two hours later the blog had to temper its enthusiasm, having noticed that it would take huge amounts of energy, probably from nuclear power, to make it work.
This sort of thoughtless enthusiasm is way too common. At least no investors lost money this time, or, rather, yet.
I don’t want to insult anyone, but I think the real problem is that people don’t understand the chemistry — not even at a freshman level — that’s involved in thinking about what it would take to turn CO2 into fuel on an industrial scale.
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Published on December 21st, 2007
What if I told you the Federal Government would be paying to experimentally inject 1 million tons of carbon dioxide into the ground under Illinois? And what if I said the CO2 would by supplied by an ethanol plant owned and operated by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)?
You’d say I was crazy, right?
On Tuesday, the Department of Energy awarded $66.7 million to investigate large-scale carbon sequestration programs in Illinois. The money was awarded to the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium, one of seven regional carbon sequestration partnerships funded by the DOE and consisting of private businesses, state entities, and local universities in the Illionois-Kentucky-Indiana geographic region. This is all part of the DOE’s 10-year initiative to establish and commercialize carbon sequestration. Read the rest of this entry »
