Archive for June 17th, 2012

Credit: DonkeyHotey, from a NASA image, CC BY 2.0

Much of today’s discourse about environmental problems revolves around the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But that’s not nearly enough, according to Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

The Earth is facing environmental tipping points along what Rockström calls planetary boundaries, which revolve around not just climate change, but also stratospheric ozone, biodiversity, chemicals dispersion, ocean acidification, freshwater consumption, land system change, nitrogen and phosphorus discharge and atmospheric aerosol emissions. These boundaries represent load-bearing limits on human activity. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a part of the wind energy industry, you’re probably starting to get nervous. The federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), a major wind energy tax subsidy, is set to expire at the end of the year, and whether it will be renewed is anyone’s guess right now. The PTC was created by the Energy Policy Act of 1992. It provides an income tax credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the production of electricity from utility-scale wind turbines for 10 years from the start of the project.

Although efforts to renew the PTC are underway, there is no assurance that this will happen in a divided Congress. Both supporters and foes of the PTC have lined up and vocally defended their side of the issue, taking potshots at each other and wielding conflicting reports and predictions. Read the rest of this entry »