President Obama was in Elkhart County, Ind., and Vice President Joe Biden traveled to NextEnergy, a nonprofit, in Detroit on Wednesday to promote battery development as an important piece of developing the less-polluting vehicles. From The Detroit News, “Big 3, Michigan win big in battery grants”:

Detroit — Michigan and Detroit’s Big Three automakers will receive more than $1.3 billion of $2.4 billion in federal battery and electric vehicle grants, the White House said today.

“The battle for America’s future will be fought and won in places like Elkhart and Detroit,” President Barack Obama said today at a speech in Indiana, outlining the awards that do not need to be repaid.

Five teams in Michigan will receive $966 million of the $1.5 billion in battery manufacturing grants as part of an effort to speed the introduction of mass market plug-in electric hybrid vehicles.

Funding for the 48 grants for advanced battery and electric drive projects comes from the stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The projects were selected through a competive Department of Energy process, and recipients will put up a 50 percent cost share.  The White House news release provides more details of what the grants will cover:

•  $1.5 billion in grants to U.S. based manufacturers to produce batteries and their components and to expand battery recycling capacity;
•  $500 million in grants to U.S. based manufacturers to produce electric drive components for vehicles, including electric motors, power electronics, and other drive train components; and
•  $400 million in grants to purchase thousands of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles for test demonstrations in several dozen locations; to deploy them and evaluate their performance; to install electric charging infrastructure; and to provide education and workforce training to support the transition to advanced electric transportation systems.

President Obama’s speech.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu traveled to a Mecklenberg County, N.C., factory to announce a $49 million grant for Celgard, which makes porous membranes for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Chu’s speech.

More news coverage…

• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “Johnson Controls wins big hybrid battery grant.”
• Bloomberg, “GM, Chrysler, Ford Share in U.S. Grants for Batteries.
• NPR, “Obama Returns to Indiana, Says Stimulus is Working“
• Detroit Free Press, “$1.36 billion to create technology epicenter in Michigan“

The influx of federal money is definitely a big story in Michigan and the Detroit Area. More from the Free Press:

Lots of blogospheric commentary about Energy Secretary Steven Chu telling his Nobel Prize-winning buddies in London that America’s roofs should be painted white to counter global warming. White roofs absorb less heat than dark roofs, just as concrete roads won’t be as hot as asphalt. As The Independent reports, Chu explained:

If that building is air-conditioned, it’s going to be a lot cooler, it can use 10 or 15 per cent less electricity. You also do something in that you change the albedo of the Earth – you make it more reflective. So the sunlight comes down and it actually goes back up – there is no greenhouse effect.

Makes intuitive sense. One of the reasons temperatures appear to have risen is urban areas, where measuring devices are placed, have become heat sinks because of pavement and buildings. It’s always five degrees warmer in D.C. than it is in Herndon.

And how do we get to this better, whiter future?  From the U.K. Times Online:

“I think with flat-type roofs you can’t even see, yes, I think you should regulate,” Professor Chu said.

Great, the federal government operating as a national condo association.

Do agents of the government never think about the real-world consequences of their good ideas? We like the prospect of paint manufacturers doing more business, but regulations equal dictates equal, “Oh, good afternoon. We’re from the Federal Office of Paint, Coating and Surface Monitoring.” We have to give those million of new government “volunteers” something to do.

James Lileks wrote about the dystopian potential at his blog today:

These things invariably lead to excitable public servants coming back – via jet, of course – from a really exciting convention where there was just a lot of positive energy about change, and then the officials commission a White Roof Study, which leads to someone commissioning a White Roof Commission, which leads to outreach, consciousness raising,  and a total of 145 white roofs in town –  and this leads to a newspaper story about the Growing Trend towards white roofs. A few city buildings are painted; the mayor is on hand for each. They look filthy after six months. One day in July passersby are treated to the site of city workers hosing down the roof in the middle of a drought.

The greatest danger we see? Ten, 20, 30 years down the road, some ambitious attorney general from a state like, oh, Rhode Island, will find a way to sue all the manufacturers who made the paint. Just because they had to have done something wrong.

“UN calls for spending 750 billion dollars in Global Green New Deal“:

New York – The world’s 20 most advanced economies should discuss investment of 1 per cent of global gross domestic product – about 750 billion dollars – into five sectors to build an environmentally sustainable global economy, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Thursday.

Such an amount could finance a ‘Global Green New Deal,’ drawing on the idea of the New Deal
launched by US president Franklin D Roosevelt to help put an end to the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Green New Deal? See, that’s different than the Green Marshall Plan. Although both would involve taxing wealth creation, transfering that wealth to government-favored causes.

WSJ, “Energy Chief Says U.S. Is Open to Carbon Tariff“:

WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday advocated adjusting trade duties as a “weapon” to protect U.S. manufacturing, just a day after one of China’s top climate envoys warned of a trade war if developed countries impose tariffs on carbon-intensive imports.

Mr. Chu, speaking before a House science panel, said establishing a carbon tariff would help “level the playing field” if other countries haven’t imposed greenhouse-gas-reduction mandates similar to the one President Barack Obama plans to implement over the next couple of years. It is the first time the Obama administration has made public its view on the issue.

“If other countries don’t impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage…[and] we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost,” Mr. Chu said.

Bloomberg, “China’s Xie Calls U.S. Tariff Threat on Climate ‘Protectionism’”:
March 18 (Bloomberg) — China’s top negotiator on climate change said a U.S. proposal to impose duties on imports with countries that don’t try to limit their carbon emissions was “an excuse to impose trade restrictions.”

Xie Zhenhua, the vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, said he was “absolutely opposed” to a comment by Energy Secretary Steven Chu yesterday that tariffs should be considered “in order to protect American industries.” Chu, speaking before a congressional panel, said the duties would prevent U.S. companies from being at a disadvantage in competition with China and India.

We’re tempted to make a wisecrack — As a trade minister, Secretary Chu is a good scientist — but it does appear he’s representing the Administration’s position.

Good luck Ambassador Kirk!

Energy Secretary Steven Chu delivered the keynote address Wednesday to the DOE-NARUC National Electricity Delivery Forum here in Washington, “The preeminent public policy forum on the Nation’s electric power delivery system infrastructure.”

The stimulus bill contained, by most accounts, $11 billion for transmission grid improvements, and Chu is promising to move quickly on funding approval and distribution. From the AP:

On the need to expand and modernize the transmission grid, Chu demonstrated his “hands-on” involvement in such issues as “smart grid” development, and the importance of the grid to making wind-produced electricity a larger share of the nation’s power supply.

The good news is that the United States has vast areas where wind is plentiful, he said, but “the bad news is renewable energy sources are in places that don’t have many people” requiring construction of new transmission lines.

Good. Too bad judges, acting on lawsuits by environmentalists, are disinclined to let that happen. From the Northern Virginia Daily, “Ruling gives power line authority back to states“:

A U.S. appellate court ruling puts power over electric transmission line projects, such as the pending Potomac-Appalachian Transmission Highline, back in states’ hands.

The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals published its opinion Wednesday in a case brought by the Warrenton-based Piedmont Environmental Council regarding rules set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the implementation of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

“The decision directly upholds a state’s right to reject a transmission line project without fear of the federal government stepping in to overrule that State’s determination,” Christopher G. Miller, president of PEC, states in a press release. “In plain language, the utilities do not get a second chance if the state rejects a line based upon the merits.”

In practical political language, that means that it is much easier for environmental and NIMBY groups to block the construction of transmission lines anywhere in the United States. So much for the plentiful wind energy.

The Fourth Circuit’s opinion in the lawsuit brought by the Piedmont Environmental Council and the Public Service Commission of New York and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission against FERC is available here.

And we’ll link to Secretary Chu’s speech if and when it becomes available.

From BNET Industries, “New DoE Head, Illinois Line Up in Favor of Clean Coal“:

The stars are aligning up once again for clean coal as Barack Obama approaches his presidential coronation. At both the Federal and state level, policymakers are talking about the technology. And sensing an inexorable change on its way, utilities and energy companies are duly lining up to help, albeit for a price.

Within the states, several larger actors are working to pass laws encouraging or even mandating new clean coal plants. At the forefront is Illinois, which just passed a bill allowing $18 million for a full-size clean coal plant some 25 miles southeast of Springfield. The two companies that will construct and operate the plant are Tenaska and MDL Holding, both privately held, while ComEd, a division of Exelon, would be required to buy electricity from the plant, provided rates didn’t rise too high.

More from The Chicago Tribune, “‘Clean coal’: Law could open door to new generation of coal-burning power plants.”

From the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, “Big Stone II pushes clean-energy alternative“:

Can an offer of clean-energy technology seal the deal for Big Stone II?

A group of rural utilities hoping to gain approval for high-voltage power lines from the proposed coal-fired power plant in South Dakota on Tuesday offered to equip the plant with such technology at a hearing before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

The offer was the latest effort by utilities led by Otter Tail Power of Fergus Falls, Minn., to support the proposed Big Stone II power plant in Milbank, S.D. The matter has been before the PUC for more than three years.

And from September, Der Spiegel, “New German Facility Begins Testing CO2 Sequestration“:

A remote spot in Brandenburg has become a popular destination for politicians in the past few months: the Schwarze Pumpe coal power station near Spremberg. Former SPD leader Kurt Beck visited, as did Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee. Brandenburg’s Governor Matthias Platzeck has been there several times.

The attraction? Over the last two years, Swedish power supplier Vattenfall has built a pilot program to demonstrate how CO2 emissions from coal plants can be captured and pumped underground. The technology, known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), could play a major role in the future of coal-fired energy sources. CCS may give the coal business, regarded as a harmful player in global warming, a much-needed green touch.

Oh yes, as to the photo inset, that’s another one of the ads in the D.C. Metro by the big-money coalition of green activists attacking clean coal. See below. We think it’s a mermaid, but it’s not too terribly clear. Maybe it’s just a cheesecake photo to draw the eye of male commuters.

Sexists.

From The Calgary Herald, “Pick for U. S. energy secretary eyes opportunity in clean coal“:

Emissions – Steven Chu, president-elect Barack Obama’s choice for energy secretary, said the United States has an “opportunity” to develop technologies that would burn coal with fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

“I feel very strongly that this is not only an opportunity, it’s something the U.S., with its great technological leadership, should rise to the occasion to develop,” Chu, 60, said Tuesday at a hearing of the senate energy and natural resources committee, which is considering his nomination.

How disappointing for all the anti-energy activists to whom coal is the environment’s bete noire. Chu has told them to go to hoille.

Chu and by extension the Obama Administration’s endorsement of clean-coal comes just as big-money environmentalists are spending millions on an advertising campaign attacking the technology. The Sunday news-chat shows are full of the TV spots, which are clever enough — a fellow standing on an empty, windswept plain, saying triumphantly, “This is today’s clean-coal technology.” (Watch it here.)

At the Metro Center subway stations here in D.C., the coalition that promotes itself at This is Reality.org, has bought most of the wall display space and hung banners to sell the message that there’s no such thing as clean coal. Like the TV spots, it’s another effort at hip advertising — see, this Sasquatch (mermaid, space alien) is holding a piece of coal claiming it’s clean, and since Sasquatches don’t exist, clean-coal doesn’t exist.

The message strikes us as too complicated and ironic for an effective ad campaign on public policy. Worse: It’s stupid and anti-science. The argument is that because some technology does not currently exist, it will never exist, and therefore we should not use that source of energy now or embark on any R&D.

If you applied that attitude consistently, then we’d never have wind, solar, biofuels, nuclear power — or certaintly not competitively price power generation from those sources. We’d never make any progress, period. This Is Reality is selling Luddism as an answer to today’s energy and environmental challenges.

The editorial page editor of The D.C. Examiner, Mark Tapscott, wrote a column on the campaign by the groups — Alliance for Climate Protection, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters. Tapscott reminds us that coal represents the No. 1 source of power generation in the United States, identifies the amazing progress made in reducing coal emissions, and the prosperity and life-saving technology made possible by affordable production of electricity. From “Coal Lies From A Progressive Fable Factory“:

New technologies are on the horizon such as gasification and carbon-capture that promise to make coal burning even more environmentally friendly.

So strictly speaking, the “clean coal” technologies aren’t here yet. But then neither are the alternative energy supplies the environmentalists regularly cite as ready replacements for coal and other carbon-based fuels. And there are serious trade-offs with the alternatives that environmentalists don’t like to talk about.

In the end, whom are we to believe, a Nobel prize-winning scientist or an ironic Sasquatch?

Which is reassuring…

From Washington Times, “Obama energy pick backs coal”

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to head the Energy Department told senators Tuesday that developing “clean coal” technology must be a national priority and said the ban on offshort drilling should not be reinstated.

Steven Chu, Mr. Obama’s designated energy secretary, also said Congress should maintain and expand its nuclear loan program and not put back into place a longtime ban on offshore oil-and-gas drilling.

“I think it is imperative to use coal as cleanly as possible,” Mr. Chu said Tuesday at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. …[snip]

Mr. Chu clarified previous remarks he had made that coal was his “worst nightmare,” saying that the nation will have to rely on coal power while it develops alternative energy sources and improves energy efficiency.

From a U.C. Berkeley PR interview with Steven Chu, Sept. 30, 2005:

Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?

Absolutely. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear; there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early ’70s. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and [nuclear] proliferation. The technology of separating [used fuel from still-viable fuel] and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be used to make bomb material.

And then there’s the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we’ve got to recycle the waste. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we’d fill up Yucca Mountain. [Yucca Mountain, which sits on federal land in Nevada , is under consideration as a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel.] So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Well, we don’t have three or four Yucca Mountains. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. But the current best estimates – and these are really estimates, the Lab’s in fact – is that the metal casings [containing the waste] will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. That’s still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed.

Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. At a thousand years, even though that’s still a long time, it’s in the realm that we can monitor – we don’t need Yucca Mountain.

NEI Nuclear Notes, which directed us to the Berkeley interview, has been blogging on Chu’s nomination. It also observes:

Interesting to note up top, though, is that Steven Chu is a signatory on the DOE Labs’ report “A Sustainable Energy Future: The Essential Role of Nuclear Energy,” released this past August. You can read that here (as a pdf).

resident-elect Obama formally announced his energy and environmental team Monday afternoon. From the news release: Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy; Lisa Jackson, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator; Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change; and Heather Zichal, Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change.

NAM President John Engler issued a statement:

President-elect Obama’s choice of Steve Chu to be Secretary of Energy, Lisa Jackson as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Carol Browner to lead the policy council on environment and energy, and Nancy Sutley to Chair the Council on Environmental Quality, reflects his continuing determination to bring highly qualified people into his Administration, and his commitment to the vitally important task of bridging the nation’s energy needs with the complex challenge of climate change. All three of these individuals are highly regarded in their fields and bring with them noteworthy commitment to public service. The challenge they face is daunting, not only in its scope, but also in the potential it holds for jobs and energy security. The manufacturers of America look forward to working with the new energy and environmental team to balance energy needs with environmental considerations.

In recent discussions with NAM members, Engler has consistently emphasized the need for developing and using as many forms of energy as possible,  ruling nothing out, and noted campaign statements from then Senator Obama expressing an openness to off-shore drilling. After all…

WASHINGTON – The development of America’s vast domestic oil and natural gas resources that had been kept off-limits by Congress for decades could generate more than $1.7 trillion in government revenue, create thousands of new jobs and enhance the nation’s energy security by significantly boosting domestic production, a study released Monday shows.

The ICF International study, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), shows that developing the offshore areas that had been subject to Congressional moratoria until recently, as well as the resources in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a small portion of currently unavailable federal lands in the Rockies, would lift U.S. crude oil production by as much as 2 million barrels per day in 2030, offsetting nearly a fifth of the nation’s imports. Natural gas production could increase by 5.34 billion cubic feet per day, or the equivalent of 61 percent of the expected natural gas imports in 2030.

The study also estimates that the development of all U.S. oil and natural gas resources on federal lands could exceed $4 trillion over the life of the resources.

If the goal of the new Administration is to stimulate the economy and create jobs, expanding access to the vast wealth in now off-limits energy resources would be a great move.

That’s the headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial today examining President-elect Obama’s expected energy and environmental team. In turning to Carol Browner to fill the new position of White House energy and environment coordinator – the Green Czarina? – the President-elect has chosen an official whose record reflects a belief in regulation as the preferred answer to any environmental policy question. Economic vitality isn’t much of a consideration.

The Journal interprets the Browner appointment as indication of the next Administration’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

The Obama Administration is “sitting on some authority,” Ms. Browner warned at the Center for American Progress recently. She says the White House is prepared to use that power “in the event that perhaps there can’t be some sort of agreement reached with Congress on how to move legislation.” In other words, Ms. Browner will use the threat of brute regulatory force as a political bludgeon if Capitol Hill declines to inflict some carbon tax on voters in the midst of a recession.

Not only will this incur colossal economic costs, but it bypasses normal democratic debate. In that sense it’s suggestive of the radicalism of Mr. Obama’s climate agenda. When Mr. Obama said during the campaign that he favored “nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy” in the name of global warming, we figured he couldn’t mean something so utopian. Maybe he does.

As for the “team of rivals” hype, the rest of Mr. Obama’s energy list is heavy with Ms. Browner’s acolytes. Lisa Jackson, for 16 years a top EPA enforcement officer, will now run that agency. At the White House Council on Environmental Quality will be Nancy Sutley, who was Ms. Browner’s special assistant at EPA. At a Congressional hearing last year, Ms. Browner declared that trying to eliminate carbon — a main input of industrial civilization — “need not bankrupt us.” As a standard for policy, that’s not exactly reassuring.

Our private-sector acquaintances in New Jersey have good things to say about Lisa Jackson, regarding her as someone business can work with. At least one environmentalist group — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — has attacked Jackson for being insufficiently green, so that’s another mark in her favor.

So Jackson, if nominated, will likely be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, as a White House advisor and coordinator, Browner could escape the Senate confirmation process.

Speaking of bypassing normal democratic debate…