After taking a look yesterday at economic consequences of rising food prices along with the affects ethanol may have on the rising food prices, a moral perspective must also be taken into account.
Read more on Does Ethanol Production Promote Sound Stewardship?…
In this week’s Acton Commentary, I discuss whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulation of carbon emissions can be justified from a Christian perspective. The EPA has found that carbon emissions endanger “public health and welfare,” and it is on track to begin regulating vehicle and power plant emissions.
Read more on Carbon Regulation: Ecological Utopia or Economic Nightmare?…
When it comes to energy policy, there is no perfect fuel. But in these debates, as elsewhere, the imaginary perfect fuel cannot become the enemy of the good.
And for the first time in recent memory, this means that nuclear energy, by all accounts a good alternative for the scale of demand we face, might be getting a seat at the table. Coal, which still provides more than half of the energy for the American grid, is cheap and plentiful, but environmentally and politically costly. And according to Popular Mechanics, it can only be “cleaned” up so much. That leaves a huge gap for other sources to fill.
A follow-up to Marc’s post concerning the feasibility of wind power: The power company here recently conducted an 18-month study on the potential of residential-based wind and solar power under local conditions. Their finding was that the wind turbine failed to meet expectations, the solar panels performed as expected, but neither provided a cost-benefit ration that makes it a compelling alternative for most energy consumers. Personally I think there is promise in renewable energy, residentially produced or otherwise, but studies such as this demonstrate that the technology isn’t adequate (or the price levels of conventional energy sources adequately high) to justify widespread migration to renewable energy. Yet.
In this week’s commentary, “Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil,” I ask the question: “Why did God create oil?” I raise the question within the context of debates about global warming and the burning of fossil fuels, including Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and the work of the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
Read more on Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil…
A three-day meeting is scheduled to begin tomorrow in Toledo, Ohio, and is set to discuss the possibility of putting wind farms on the Great Lakes. The session is sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency among other groups, and will include conversations about “how to protect birds, bats and fish from the windmills.”
