Earth Track Blog

In advance of Tuesday's election, I thought it would be useful to have a quick look at Mitt Romney's vision for the country's energy future. This blog post provides links to other assessments of his broader energy plan that I think do a nice job framing some important issues, and then discusses...

Politicians love government credit subsidy programs. Direct loans, or loan guarantees (where the government will make good on a debt lent by others), provide a quick infusion of capital to favored constituent groups or industries with little or no immediate budget hit. Often, there is a nice story...

In the movie Field of Dreams, actor Kevin Costner hears a voice in his head telling him "If you build it, he will come." The "it" is a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field; the "he" is his dead father. Onlookers, of course, think he is crazy, which perhaps he is. But at least in the...

All forms of energy in the United States get some subsidies -- it's the American way, I suppose. But big PR battles are fought on who gets how much. In a recent webinar I did for The Vote Solar Initiative, my goal was to highlight the missing parts of the subsidy estimates that continue to receive...

In advance of the G20 meeting in Los Gatos, Mexico this past June, Earth Track and Oil Change International did a detailed review of how the member countries were doing in meeting their 2009 commitments to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. The resulting report, Phasing Out Fossil-Fuel...

Back in May, Earth Track teamed up with Oil Change International and NRDC to look at the tar sands exemption from tax used to finance the US' Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. We estimated that the exemption was worth nearly $400 million between 2010 and 2017, despite the fact that tar sands have...

It's an interesting time to watch biofuels markets. A couple of years ago, with commodity prices spiraling, there was great concern that fuel markets were outbidding food and feed markets for edible biomass. Now, reporter Judy Keen notes that the United States is facing drought in nearly 80 percent...

A large portion of the spending to develop alternative energy options for the military makes sense. Delivering fuels to the front lines costs dramatically more than the raw cost of the fuel itself. Military assessments estimate that the delivered cost of a mission-ready gasoline is almost always...

Harvard economics Professor David Glaeser has an interesting editorial on the role of mining in Australia, published yesterday by Bloomberg. The basic thrust of his argument is that capital-intensive coal and iron ore industries dominate Australian exports, but harm long-term competitiveness. He...

The "End Polluter Welfare Act (EPWA)," introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) last week aims to strip away as many federal subsidies to fossil fuels as possible. The bill reaches well beyond the short-list of most obvious subsidies that past reform efforts have...

Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI), a Washington, DC-based consulting firm, has periodically released a tally of historical subsidies to energy in the United States. The most recent compilation came out in October 2011, covering the period 1950 to 2010. Continuing its multi-decade long...

For years, the International Energy Agency has been measuring subsidies to consumers by looking at the gap between world reference prices for a particular form of energy and what that energy sells for in a country's domestic market. The lower the cost to consumers relative to its world value, the...

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holding company owns lots of things, and earns a nice return on them. NetJets, one of their divisions, has recently come under fire for paying too little taxes. The issue is ironic because Buffett has argued that the tax structure favors the rich, and yet one of...

A simple Google search for " Jindal incentive," looking for descriptions of incentives the Louisiana Governor has put on the table for all sorts of groups, brings back 1.6 million hits. There are so many subsidy announcements that it's hard to imagine even a McDonald's restroom can be built in the...

Houston-based DKRW Advanced Fuels has a dream: they want to turn a chunk of Wyoming's vast coal reserves into 10,600 barrels of gasoline per day. They want to capture most of the carbon emitted in the process and sell it to the state's oil and gas industry, which will use the CO2 to inject into...

I guess if I'm to listen to Fareed Zakaria "The Case for Making it in the USA: Like it or not (and I don't) we need a manufacturing policy to stay competitive," subsidies up-and-down the Keystone XL pipeline should be viewed as just par for the course. Though Zakaria acknowledges the government isn...

I am often asked what forms of energy should be subsidized. Though much of my work documents how subsidies end up wasting money and don't achieve their stated goals, I don't universally reject the use of public resources to help implement important societal shifts. Clearly, we have a moral...

Another useful summary of the proliferation concerns associated with "peaceful" power reactors from Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center: At first blush, our government’s approach to head off Iranian nuclear weapons with tighter sanctions and military threats seems totally...

Energy Fair, based in the UK, has just launched a case before the European Commission challenging a range of subsidies to nuclear power in the UK. Among other issues, the complaint attacks artificially low caps on operator liabilities for accidents and waste disposal. They estimate that the accident...

When the World Nuclear Association (WNA), the nuclear industry's global cheerleader, describes potential damages from a reactor accident, they do so in a strategically simplistic way: Operators of nuclear power plants are liable for any damage caused by them, regardless of fault. They therefore...