By JACOB BUNGE And TESS STYNES SEPTEMBER 7, 2010, 12:37 P.M. ET

Original source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358904575477452109794016.html?mod=WSJ_Energy_leftHeadlines

NYSE Euronext plans to expand its carbon-trading business from Europe to the U.S. and Asia through a joint venture that sets up a three-way battle among exchanges to expand a once-promising market.

The exchange operator is fusing its Paris-based BlueNext unit with APX Inc., a U.S.-based provider of trading technology to focus on derivatives contracts tied to renewable energy and emissions.

The new NYSE Blue joint venture will compete with offerings from IntercontinentalExchange Inc. and CME Group Inc. in a market which has had its growth partly stalled by the halt of efforts to enact cap-and-trade legislation in the U.S.

“We think the marriage of an infrastructure company, APX, with strong links to voluntary carbon and renewable energy markets, is going to give us a competitive advantage going forward,” said Brian Storms, chief executive of APX, who will take over as CEO of NYSE Blue.

Mr. Storms said in an interview that he saw no chance of any U.S. cap-and-trade legislation this year, but that NYSE Blue could benefit from “evolving” state-level programs centered on renewable energy and region-specific programs like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

China holds opportunity as well, Storms said, citing government plans to introduce cap-and-trade pilot programs in several cities; there, NYSE Blue would vie with ICE’s Climate Exchange, which maintains a joint venture in the country aimed at developing a new emissions trading platform. Read more

David Lightman and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

Posted on Tue, Sep. 07, 2010   last updated: September 07, 2010 05:03:24 PM

FREDERICA, Del. — Conservative Republicans around the country are using cap and trade — a way to limit global-warming pollution — as a political weapon to attack GOP moderates as well as Democrats.

Anger at big government, and its possible expansion, is a favorite conservative theme, and arguing against cap and trade allows candidates to rail against regulation and taxes.

“It’s a very big deal,” said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He cited Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky as among the states where the issue could help Republican Senate candidates. Republican strategists for seats in the House of Representatives also consider cap and trade an important talking point in close races. Read more

Sep 7 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Chris Casteel The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16896264

The Obama administration’s emphasis on clean energy and the fight in Congress over energy legislation is creating some tension among certain sectors, including the natural gas and wind power industries.

The American Wind Energy Association has been fighting to counter a recent column in The Wall Street Journal that challenged a key selling point of wind — that it reduces carbon emissions. The industry also is defending its federal subsidies, arguing that they are actually less than those received by oil and gas companies.

“We’ve been under attack by the fossil fuel industry for the last six months,” Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, told reporters in July.

Bode is a former Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner, but she’s also a former head of the Washington-based trade group for independent oil and gas producers and was a highly visible advocate for the natural gas industry when she worked for the American Clean Skies Foundation.

Now, her organization is claiming that an oil and gas company trade group and think tanks financed in part with energy money are spreading misinformation to discredit wind as a renewable energy source. Read more

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have wavered on Proposition 23, trying to appease their conservative base without alienating independent voters. Fiorina finally came out in favor of it last week.

By Seema Mehta and Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times  September 8, 2010

Original source: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/la-me-0908-gop-global-20100908,0,2762779.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fpolitics%2Fcal+%28L.A.+Times+-+California+Politics%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

A November ballot measure that would rescind California’s landmark global warming bill until unemployment drops significantly has become an albatross for the Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate.

For months, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have struggled with competing imperatives: appeasing members of their party who want to suspend the global warming bill while wooing environmentally-conscious independent voters who could carry them to victory in November.

Fiorina’s uncertainty produced one of her most difficult moments during her first debate with Sen. Barbara Boxer last week, when she was repeatedly pressed for a position on Proposition 23 but declined to give one. She came out in support of the ballot measure two days later.

Whitman has yet to be pinned down.

Their reticence may also reflect divisions in the business community over the measure, which would suspend the global warming law until unemployment drops to 5.5% or lower for one year. Opposition to the November measure is particularly strong in the Silicon Valley, their home turf and an area they have mined for campaign contributions.

“It raises different strategic choices for both of the candidates,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. “The fact that they’re hesitating suggests they fear they could lose something there.”

Two-thirds of California voters support the state’s climate change law, which would require California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels over a decade; 53% believe the state should act to reduce such emissions immediately rather than wait for the economy to improve, according to a July poll by the Public Policy Institute of California. Notably, more than 7 in 10 independent voters support the state’s climate law.

Those voters tend to be fiscally conservative but socially and environmentally liberal, and are key to the Republicans’ efforts to make up for Democrats’ double-digit voter registration edge in California, said Mark Baldassare, president of the nonpartisan institute. Read more

September 8, 2010 | Susanne Rust

Original source: http://californiawatch.org/watchblog/out-state-polluters-pump-effort-kill-climate-law-4541

Industrial polluters from outside of California, including Koch Industries, are stepping up the pressure to kill AB 32, California’s landmark climate change law, by flooding millions of dollars into the campaign set to derail the landmark legislation.

On Sept. 1, Flint Hills Resources, a Wichita, Kansas-based refining and chemical company owned by Koch Industries, donated $1 million to the “Yes on 23,” or California Jobs Initiative, campaign.

“Our company believes the implementation of AB 32 will set a bad precedent for regulations in other states and the federal government,” said Katie Stavinoha, spokeswoman for Flint Hills Resources.

The following day, the Texas-based Tesoro Corporation contributed $1 million on top of the more than $500,000 already donated to the campaign. Additional recent out-of-state donors include Texas-based Valero Energy Corp., Texas-based Frontier Oil Corp., and the Utah-based Western Petroleum Marketers Association.

Only one group donating to the “Yes on 23″ campaign in the last month – the California American Council of Engineering Companies Issues Fund – is from California. Read more

Sep 7 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Dan Wallach The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16897476

Entergy Texas got a rate increase and its customers now will pay less for power through at least next February.

How is this possible?  Read more

By Peter Whoriskey Tuesday, September 7, 2010; 10:39 PM

Original source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090706933.html

WINCHESTER, VA. – The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

“Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

“Everybody’s jumping on the green bandwagon,” said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But “we’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE. ”

Doyle was speaking after a shift last month surrounded by several co-workers around a picnic table near the punch clock. Many of the workers have been at the plant for decades, and most appeared to be in their 40s and 50s. Several worried aloud about finding another job. Read more

By CRISTINA SILVA  The Associated Press  Tuesday, September 7, 2010; 8:18 PM

Original source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090703721.html

LAS VEGAS — With clean-energy legislation trapped in a political deadlock, renewable-energy advocates called big business the new leader in the nation’s green revolution during a national summit meeting Tuesday.

John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, said untapped potential in the sustainable energy market could revive the stalled economy and end the recession.

“The focus now has got to be on getting these worlds and mechanisms together to finance innovative, renewable technology,” Podesta said.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hosted the third in a series of national clean-energy summit meetings Tuesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. More than 40 people rallied outside the event, with some wearing green hard hats and waving signs that equated clean energy with green jobs.

Reid said encouraging the development of emerging clean-energy industries could ease the nation’s security problems and help overcome economic woes.

“We need to take that little spark and turn it into a wildfire,” Reid said. Read more

By MARC LACEY September 7, 2010, 3:28 pm

Original source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/street-cred-vs-green-cred/

When it comes to environmental degradation, those who live and work in the open air are more exposed than most. Someone strumming a guitar for tips on the sidewalk or reading tarot cards at the curb or operating a pedicab cannot help but breathe in the pollution in the air.

So it is no surprise that the drifters recruited by an Arizona Republican operative to run as Green Party candidates consider themselves environmentalists of sorts. For instance, Benjamin Pearcy, 20, who is running for a state body that oversees utilities, wants to put solar panels up around the state to reduce utility bills and keep more people from becoming homeless. He is an animal lover as well, and in a recent stump speech mentioned his desire to create restaurants where people and animals can eat together. “I have a lot of ideas,” he said.

But the Green Party is not amused. It wants Mr. Pearcy and numerous others who managed to get on the November ballot for the Green Party to be removed. “We are actively opposing them,’’ said Erik Andersen, a Green Party spokesman in Phoenix. “We’re encouraging all Green Party voters not to vote for them. We don’t know them.”

Steve May, the Republican who recruited some of the rogue candidates, said the Green Party might be impressed with them if it got to know them. He said he went over the Green Party agenda, including its commitment to ending poverty, with each of the candidates he recruited and each of them agreed with it. “They are not stalking horse candidates,” he said.

Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/09/challenge-heightened-epa-air-quality-rules

Sep 7 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Mike Lee Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas

New information shows that it may be more challenging than expected to meet tough new air pollution standards that the federal government is proposing .

It’s the latest twist in the run-up to new federal rules on ozone, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce at the end of October.

Regulators at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, who are in charge of writing the ozone-control plan, questioned some of the results, but agreed with parts of it.

Currently, cities are deemed to violate the Clean Air Act if they have more than 85 parts per billion of ozone in their air. Dallas and Fort Worth and nine surrounding counties have violated that standard for years, despite a series of regional plans to reduce the amount of ozone.

The EPA has announced that it will lower the standard even further, to between 60 and 70 parts per billion. Read more

Sep 7 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Debra McCown Bristol Herald Courier, Va.

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16882616

A power plant in Russell County is among two in Virginia causing water quality problems from the storage of coal ash, according to a study released this week by three environmentalist organizations.

Appalachian Power’s Clinch River Plant in Carbo is identified in the report along with 38 other sites in 21 states called “toxic” in a news statement timed to coincide with the start of public hearings on the proposed federal regulation of coal ash.

The other Virginia plant highlighted in the study is Appalachian’s Glen Lyn plant in Giles County. Three plants owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority are listed in Tennessee.

The three groups — the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice and Sierra Club — allege that the ash sites are contaminating the water with heavy metals such as arsenic and lead.

They point the finger at states’ environmental protection agencies, claiming they “are not adequately monitoring the coal combustion waste” and they call on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to impose strong new regulations. Read more

Sep 7 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Cathy Dyson The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16887213

Because of toxic pollution at other sites across the nation where coal-ash waste has been dumped, King George County residents near the landfill should wonder if the same kind of material might contaminate their water, according to a group that recently studied the dangers of coal ash.

“If they’re concerned there could be a threat — and there certainly is that likelihood — they should absolutely test for arsenic, mercury, lead” and other toxic metals in the water, said Kate Pollard, a field organizer for the  Sierra Club. “There’s a much higher likelihood of contaminants from coal ash leaching into the water than what was previously understood.”

The Sierra Club partnered with the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice to produce a report on coal-ash contamination. Called “In Harm’s Way: Lack of Federal Coal Ash Regulations Endangers Americans and Their Environment,” the report was released in late August.

It was timely on national and local levels. Read more