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The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 16: U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry speaks at the Energy Policy Summit at the National Press Club, October 16, 2017 in…  Drew Angerer

Why Rick Perry’s latest failure on energy policy matters

By Steve Benen       January 9, 2018

At first blush, Rick Perry’s failure yesterday is the result of an obscure policy fight, but the closer one looks at what happened, the more interesting it becomes. The Washington Post  reported on the outcome:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday unanimously rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry that would have propped up nuclear and coal power plants struggling in competitive electricity markets.

The independent five-member commission includes four people appointed by President Trump, three of them Republicans. Its decision is binding.

To appreciate why the end of the dispute matters, it’s worth appreciating how we reached this point.

The coal and nuclear industries have more than a few old power plants, which are struggling badly in the energy marketplace, and which are widely seen as obsolete. Trump administration officials, eager to help their political allies, worked with the industry and its lobbyists on a plan to prop up those plants in ways the market has not. Indeed, the president had run on a platform of rescuing some of these coal plants, and so Trump World had to think of something in order to deliver on the promise.

The result was, well, a little bizarre. As Vox explained a few months ago, Rick Perry unveiled a proposed solution in which utility companies would pay coal and nuclear power plants “for all their costs and all the power they produce, whether those plants are needed or not.”

No, seriously, that was the plan. Consumers – which is to say, us – would effectively bail out obsolete plants, creating unnatural profits for their owners, even if utility companies had more affordable alternatives, and even if the plants themselves are not economically viable, because the Trump administration would mandate it.

Asked a congressional hearing in October whether he considered the costs to the public, Perry replied, “I think you take costs into account, but what’s the cost of freedom?”

With that in mind, Trump’s Energy secretary also said the country has no choice but to prop up obsolete plants – because there’s an energy grid crisis that requires those plants to remain strong. This argument also soon crumbled under scrutiny.

But Perry nevertheless plowed forward, asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to approve his plan. Yesterday, the commission, led by a Republican majority, rejected Perry’s proposal, killing the ridiculous plan.

Even Trump-appointed members of the FERC simply couldn’t go along with this one.

That’s a sensible outcome, but I’d love to see a broader conversation about why Trump’s Department of Energy thought this was an idea worth pursuing in the first place.

Digital Trends

The ‘world’s biggest wind farm’ could send power to as many as five countries

by Trevor Mogg     January 7, 2018

While most offshore wind farms are located close to the coast, an ambitious plan by a Dutch energy firm involves the creation of what would be the world’s biggest wind farm featuring a central man-made island as the power hub. TenneT

Dutch-controlled TenneT says the hub could be located in the North Sea and provide power to not only the Netherlands, but also the U.K., Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium.

All of these countries are roughly the same distance from the proposed site, Dogger Bank, a vast sandbank about 160 miles north-west of the Netherlands and 60 miles off the east coast of England.

The power hub on the 2.3-square-mile artificial island would be surrounded by numerous wind turbines capable of providing power, via long-distance cables, to each of the countries.

The wind farm could provide power to the Netherlands, U.K., Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium.  TenneT

As noted by the Guardian, TenneT claims its plan could lead to savings of billions of dollars over conventional wind farms and international power cables.

Offshore wind farms produce alternating current that suffers loss when sent over long distances, so the hub would convert it to more efficient direct current before sending it to nearby nations via more affordable cables. It would then be converted back to alternating current for delivery to homes and businesses.

TenneT is planning to produce a more detailed proposal this year, and said that if construction went ahead, the earliest it could be operational is 2027.

But the bold project faces plenty of hurdles, including securing both cooperation and funding from other energy companies in Europe.

If they can work together to make it happen, the wind farm could have a capacity of 30GW — more than double the total installed offshore wind power across all of Europe today.

With opposition from those living close to proposed wind farms a constant obstacle to their construction, it’s little surprise that energy firms are beginning to look at sites further offshore.

Rob van der Hage, manager of TenneT’s offshore wind grid development program, told the Guardian that “onshore wind is hampered by local opposition and near-shore is nearly full,” adding that it was therefore logical to look at the idea of placing wind farms farther away from land.

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

The Polar Pioneer oil drilling rig arrives aboard a transport ship, following a journey across the Pacific, in view of the Olympic Mountains in Port Angeles, Wash. on April 17, 2015.   Photo by Daniella Beccaria/seattlepi.com/File/AP

Big Oil can count on its allies in Trump’s Washington

By Steve Benen      January 8, 2018 

Quick quiz: can you name the first policy legislation Donald Trump signed into law? Let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane.

The Obama administration required oil companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments, and one of the very first things the Republican-led Congress tackled was a bill to kill that regulation. In early February 2017, the president signed it, describing the policy as “a big deal.”

The industry lobbyists who championed the measure certainly thought so.

The move was a harbinger of sorts for an administration that seems determined to help Big Oil and its interests. This was evident a couple of weeks ago when the Trump administration announced it’s scaling back drilling safeguards created after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which was followed a week later by the unveiling of a new plan to vastly expand coastal oil drilling.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported the other day that Trump’s tax plan included a specific tax break that oil companies were pleased to receive.

Congressional Republicans allowed a tax on oil companies that generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually for federal oil-spill response efforts to expire [on Jan. 1] – a move that amounts to another corporate break in the wake of lawmakers’ sweeping tax overhaul late last month.

The tax on companies selling oil in the United States generated an average of $500 million in federal revenue per year, according to the Government Accountability Office. The money, collected through a 9 cents-per-barrel tax on domestic crude oil and imported crude oil and petroleum products, constituted the main source of revenue for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.

It’s worth emphasizing that the per-barrel tax may yet be reinstated – a move some congressional Democrats already support – but as things stand right now, this is another one of those industry breaks included in the Republican tax plan that few noticed until now.

The larger point, of course, is that in Trump’s Washington, Big Oil has allies it can count on. Indeed, as The New Republic’s Emily Atkin recently noted, it’s also worth remembering that the new Republican tax plan “allows oil production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which had previously been off-limits due to dangerous, icy conditions and ecologically sensitive environment,” and is “expected to add $1 billion in profits to U.S. oil and gas exploration and production companies” through corporate tax breaks.

When Trump World talks about championing the interests of “the forgotten men and women,” perhaps they’re referring to oil industry executives?

Newsweek Science

The Ocean Floor Is Sinking Under The Water Weight From Melting Glaciers, And It’s As Bad As It Sounds

Dana Dovey, Newsweek     January 7, 2018 

So much extra water is being added into the world’s oceans from melting glaciers that the ocean floor is sinking underneath its increasing weight. This ocean floor deformation also means we have miscalculated just how much ocean levels are rising and the problem could be far worse than previously believed.

Over the past 20 years, ocean basins have sunk an average of 0.004 inches per year. This means that the ocean is 0.08 inches deeper than it was two decades ago. While this small fragment of an inch may not seem much, oceans cover 70 percent of our planet, making the problem bigger than it seems at an initial glance.

Related: NASA Map Reveals Drastic U.S. Weather Change In Past Eight Years

In a study published online in Geophysical Research Levels, researchers explain how they used a mathematical equation known as the elastic sea level equation to more accurately measure the ocean floor. This allowed them to see how much the bottom of the ocean floor has changed from 1993 to 2014. While they are not the first scientists to look at the ocean floor, this is the first time that researchers have taken into account how additional water from melted ice may have further stretched the ocean floor, LiveScience reported.

Rising sea levels will be especially dangerous for coastal towns and cities. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The results show that the ocean is changing in ways that we previously did not realize and is sinking further into the earth’s crust. As a result, scientists have underestimated how much sea levels are rising by as much as 8 percent. The study concludes by emphasizing that future sea level measurement should take ocean floor deformation into account in order to more accurately understand how our oceans are changing.

Related: Snow In Hawaii? Mauna Kea Covered In Up To 8 Inches Of Snow

All the water on the planet today is all the water that has ever existed on the planet, but not all water is in its liquid form. Recently, rising temperatures have caused much of the frozen water on the planet’s glaciers to melt and join the ocean as liquid. This mass melting ice rising sea levels, a problem whose consequences we’re already starting to see. The first to notice the repercussions of rising sea levels are those who live in coastal areas. Rising waters mean less land to live on. In addition, more water in the ocean means that ocean storms, such as hurricanes, have the potential to be stronger and more devastating, National Geographic reported.

Small coastal areas won’t be the only ones to disappear due to rising waters and if current estimates are correct, by 2100 the ocean will rise between 11 and 38 inches, a number that could mean that much of the U.S. east coast will be covered in water, National Geographic reported.

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