The future is shale

You may have heard the beat before, but this WSJ piece is an interesting update on current developments.

Photo of the day

Satellite image of the BP oil spill.

Via Econbrowser, Where would we be without offshore oil?

Immigration vs. Energy

You wouldn't like Senator Lindsey Graham when he's angry, explains Ezra Klein, with a follow up.

What if Republicans proposed a revenue-neutral carbon tax?

Yglesias considers.

Drill, baby, drill!

The Obama administration is onboard.

FiveThirtyEight looks at the politics.

Liquid flouride thorium reactors

Apparently these could solve the world's energy problems.

Energy efficiency and the Age of Petroleum

Perry has some thoughts:

The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones, and the petroleum age won't end because we run out of petroleum.

Likewise, the age of horse/animal power didn’t end because we ran out of animals, and we didn’t stop using steam power because we couldn’t build enough steam engines.

And the age of whale oil didn't end because we ran out of whales, and the age of using wood for heating homes didn't end because we ran out of trees.

There have of course been problems with overwhaling ("Save the Whales", anyone?) but this was long after alternatives to whale oil.

More on nukes

If you want zero-carbon power, they're the only practical solution.

Carbon taxes and market distortions

Greg Mankiw gets his wonk on.  It's worth your time if you want to grasp the essentials of why a new carbon tax combined with income and payroll tax cuts is the best environmental policy.

Haven't we been through this before?

Nuclear reprocessing

The French do something right...

Used uranium is removed from reactor cores and chemically manipulated to restore its radioactivity. This process creates new fuels—and only small amounts of waste byproducts. The process can be repeated a third time and perhaps a fourth.

Yet in the United States, where reprocessing was invented, used uranium is simply discarded.

The result is highly wasteful: The once-used uranium still retains 96 percent of its energy potential. The result is likewise highly dangerous: That 96 percent potent uranium also retains a corresponding proportion of its toxicity to human life. So why do we not reprocess?

The decision was not made by accident. Back in the 1970s, the U.S. made a conscious policy decision to shut down its reprocessing facilities. The decision had nothing to do with energy policy, and everything to do with that era’s arms control illusions.

One of the byproducts of reprocessing uranium is plutonium. The plutonium produced by a civil reactor is not weapons-grade. It can be used as a fuel itself, and in France it is. But theoretically, this low-grade plutonium could be reprocessed again and again and enriched to a point where it could be used as a weapon.

On the basis of this fact, the Carter administration decided that the U.S. must eschew reprocessing altogether. It reasoned as follows: If the U.S. civil nuclear program permitted any reprocessing, even for fuel purposes only, that would compromise U.S. efforts to persuade other countries not to reprocess. And (the reasoning continued) an across-the-board ban on reprocessing was the only way to ensure against nuclear proliferation.

This reasoning lacked cogency, to put it very mildly.

First, even assuming that other nations cared about the example set by the U.S. civil nuclear program, they were bound to notice that the U.S. also maintained a military nuclear program. "Do as we say, not as we do," is not a principle likely to carry much weight.

Second, the notion that other nations would forgo nuclear weapons because we set them an example was naïve at best, narcissistic at worst. Does Iran care that the U.S. does not reprocess? Does North Korea? States make their nuclear decisions for their own reasons.

States that have drawn back from the nuclear threshold—Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa being the outstanding examples—have done so because a) new, democratic governments replaced nondemocratic governments and preferred to spend their money in other ways; and b) they feared inspiring counter-proliferation by their immediate neighbors. The only other motive that seems to work is c) the direct application of force, as with Israel against Iraq.

Gandhian self-sacrifice, by contrast, has had zero effect.

What a difference 30 years does not make

reason:

“Voters want action on energy,” one congresswoman told The Washington Post. “They don’t really care how much it costs.” A Democratic president was on the verge of signing “the most important energy legislation in a decade,” with tens of billions of dollars dedicated to jump-starting a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels and helping the United States achieve “energy independence.” For too long, most analysts agreed, America had put off the hard choices necessary to prevent the next oil shock and wean the country from petrodictators in the Middle East. Now was the time for bold investment and leadership from Washington.

The year was 1979. At the time I was a low-level regulator in President Jimmy Carter’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was a boring agency, but I got to work in its most exciting division: the special cases branch dealing with exotic new sources of power. From that perch I witnessed firsthand the sad, expensive, and now-forgotten saga of the Great Plains Coal Gasification Plant in Beulah, North Dakota. Like many projects being discussed in Washington today, Great Plains was hailed as the vanguard of a new domestic alternative to foreign oil.

In 1979, as lines at gas stations snaked for blocks, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 368 to 25, created the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation, an “independent” federal entity charged with creating new fuel sources by spending $20 billion in seed money ($57 billion in 2009 dollars) during its first five years. Originally, the Synfuels Corporation was projected to spend $88 billion ($250 billion in today’s dollars) over 12 years to build the capacity to produce the equivalent of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from coal.

That was just one element of Carter’s ambitious energy plans. In July 1979 he announced, “I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” In 1980 Congress authorized the Department of Energy to spend $1.3 billion on ethanol research and loans to produce fuel for automobiles. In May of that year, Carter declared, “For the first time in our nation’s history, we will have a national energy program to put us on the road to energy security. It’s more ambitious than the space program, the Marshall plan, and the Interstate Highway System combined.”

Sound familiar? I'll say this for liberalism: it's consistent about aiming the federal money hose at ambitious, hope-filled projects.

Link blag

Contrary to popular belief, the Iraq war continues, and it's deadly.

In 1994, five House Democrats and two Senate Democrats switched to the Republican Party. So Specter may not be the only one who wants to jump ship. But more switches are less likely now, because Obama was elected in the second of two wave years, which already ousted many Republicans in moderate districts.

Obama's SCOTUS nominee is likely to be as liberal as David Souter on social issues, so social conservatives won't miss a thing. But Souter was more moderate on business issues, so his replacement is likely to be worse for economic freedoms.

Photos of a Russian nuclear power plant.

New Hampshire, the matriarchy up North? (Fine, as long as they don't get snake-headed whips...)

Daily Beast: Islam issues sex licenses.

Overcoming Bias: Female orgasms are a screening mechanism? Study shows how lust makes one generous.

(video) Song Hye Kyo's McDonald ice-cream ad.