Earth Track Blog

Japan's Mainichi Daily News has a very interesting article looking at the price of Japanese nuclear power. Like in the US and many other countries, government sources and reactor owners have long touted nuclear as the least expensive source of power in Japan. However, Kenichi Oshima, a professor of...

The acrimony on increasing the debt ceiling is hitting a fevered pitch, and the likelihood of a technical default on US debt is unfortunately becoming a larger possibility each day. I wondered whether there was anything one could learn by looking at the personal financial filings of some of the...

Ben Gemen over at The Hill describes as "hardball" the effort by House Republicans to bring to light documents and decision making behind a $535 million loan guarantee for a new facility to be built by Solyndra. Hardball is appropriate for an unprecedented level of taxpayer exposure for investment...

Lots of action on the biofuels front to talk about: VEETC near death? Corn wiggling its way into advanced ethanol and biodiesel mandates. E15 gets a cool new warning label, but auto makers steer clear. 1) Death of VEETC? A group of Senators has introduced legislation to kill the ethanol blenders...

Each time the DOE plops down another loan guarantee in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for this type of generation or that, it is easy to forget that power is actually fungible. Small improvements in how we use power can be equally or more important to addressing energy security and...

In the latest battle in a broader war over taxation of internet sales, Amazon.com has cut 10,000 California affiliates in an effort to avoid having to pay sales tax on the billions in sales it makes each year to California residents. The money at stake is large, and the savings from delays equally...

My first stint in the world of subsidies was looking as federal disincentives to recycling in an analysis for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Most often these took the form of subsidies to primary materials. The linkages between extraction, energy-intensive processing, and competition with...

Though there have been very few quantitative estimates of the subsidy value of the accident liability cap under the Price-Anderson Act, it is clear that this value has not remained static. On the positive side, increases in required coverage over the past 20 years have provided some additional...

With pressure building in Congress to strip out at least the most obvious subsidies to oil and gas, Taxyapers for Common Sense has released a new tally of some of the major ones. The report is useful in providing updated cost estimates, and for going beyond the narrow set of provisions that the...

In the area of fixed income, one shouldn't be betting against Bill Gross of Pimco. The man is a walking, talking fixed income encyclopedia and routinely makes astute calls on bond trends and pressures. In March his total return fund (PTTRX) went to zero on US Treasuries. In April, he supposedly went...

In a speech at West Hills College in Lemoore, CA on Sunday, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin let loose on water restrictions in the arid region. Here's an extract from the AP's coverage of the event: The former Alaska governor told more than 1,400 people at West Hills College in Lemoore that...

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) launched an important project to assess the impact of the federal tax code on greenhouse gas emissions (ghg). Tax expenditures now total more than $1 trillion per year, and trigger a wide variety of changes in the level and distribution of economic...

My original information suggesting that Senator Lamar Alexander had put in a new request for EIA to update its work on energy subsidies turns out to have been incorrect. The actual requestors this time were from the House side: Congressmen Jason Chaffetz, Marsha Blackburn, and Roscoe Bartlett. I'm...

Subsidy arbitrage in international trade is not a new issue. It is popping up again in the biofuels sector, this time regarding the collection of ethanol blending credits on fuel that is then shipped out of the United States. Not surprisingly, producers in the receiving markets are not happy about...

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ruled that Calvert Cliffs 3 ineligible for licensing because is violates the Atomic Energy Act's rules on foreign ownership, control or domination. The NRC staff has determined that UniStar’s application does not meet the requirements of 10 CFR 50.38. The basis...

I've been critical in the past of Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that blew up in the Gulf Coast last year. They have used whatever tools at their disposal to shed liability for their role in the Gulf accident and spill. They have restructured their corporation to shed...

The Tax Foundation has penned a number of posts on the Section 199 Domestic Manufacturing Tax Deduction and the oil and gas industry. This subsidy allows companies to deduct up to 9 percent of their net income from domestic manufacturing activities, in the process bringing down their overall...

The latest edition of my business school alumni magazine carried a brief announcement of the death of Chuck Christenson. A shy and reserved man, Chuck gladly stepped forward in the Spring of 1991 to serve as one of two faculty advisors on what, in retrospect, was my insanely ambitious project to...

1,000,000 - Number of years for there to be a radiation-related fatality at a Japanese nuclear plant according to the goals put forth by the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission in 2003.[fn]The specific wording used by the NSC was "The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant...

The debate on US energy policy continues to rage. The reminder from Japan that nuclear reactors can, and sometimes do, have accidents is merely the worst of a number of examples in recent years about the risks and potentialities of various energy pathways. Coal mine and oil rig accidents do kill...