Recently in Energy policy Category

Dr. Doom doesn't give a fig for your commodities exchange traded funds.

In an interview with the Hard Assets Investor website ("Common Sense on Commodities"), Dr. Nouriel Roubini, who called the top on the market in 2005 with predictions of, well, doom by 2008, said speculators pouring cash into commodities funds were to blame for oil prices near $100/barrel and above.

About 30 big businesses, including several big electric utilities, are pushing the Senate for a climate change bill this year. Not the usual thing, but not surprising in this instance. A bill with dozens of provisions that make up for the pain of the mandates would be better for many of the companies than an unadorned set of requirements from the Obama administration.

At the same time, an almost innumerable list of mostly state and local companies and organizations -- but the American Petroleum Institute is in there, too -- are pushing the opposite way. MidAmerican Energy is the only big electric company involved in this group, called Energy Citizens. In DC, at least, the organization is running lots of those little bitty TV commercials urging people to save jobs and lobby their members of Congress against the measure.

Uncertainty is a dirty word in the world of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, where 2012 carbon allowance prices have sunk over the past year as buyers and sellers wait for Congress to decide how to value them in a federal cap-and-trade scheme.

Detailing the results of the RGGI market's fifth allowance auction this month, RGGI administrators said that 2012 allowance prices were just a cent above the auction clearing price of $1.86/short ton. In comparison, the first auction of 2012 allowances, held in March, saw $3.05/st.

Different people do different things with the "epiphanies" they have while working for giant corporations. Some cast off the golden handcuffs and sail around the world. Others, like John Hofmeister, take on causes related to their work, and campaign for things they couldn't take on while employed. And pursue big thoughts, like a Federal Energy Resources Board.

Hofmeister was president of Shell until last year, when he left to found Citizens for Affordable Energy, which has a wide-ranging array of interests, with a theme that appears to be: What America needs is a comprehensive energy policy.

Speaking Tuesday at a meeting in Greenwich, Connecticut, he called for an energy equivalent of the Federal Reserve to manage energy and energy infrastructure needs, including new supply, technology, carbon management and power transmission.

On her way out the door of the Alaska governor's office, Sarah Palin pinned an anti-Obama blast on the refrigerator door (the Washington Post) in the home of the folks she claims to respect the least -- all that is inside-the-Beltway.

In an op-ed article today, Palin hammered President Obama and the Waxman-Markey climate change bill as a road map to economic ruin that will jack up energy costs to consumers and businesses while doing nothing to extract more energy domestically.

Contrary to what passes for common knowledge, the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing has never been regulated by the federal government, asserts Chris Tucker, a spokesman for a pro-industry group.

Tucker works for for Energy In Depth, an educational campaign made up of about 20 independent oil and gas producers. Before he joined that outfit, he was the communications director for former US Representative John Peterson, the Pennsylvania Republican who made increasing offshore drilling a national issue.

Tucker's target is the Fracking Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009, aka the FRAC Act. The bill's two primary co-sponsors, Democratic US Representatives Diana DeGette of Colorado and Maurice Hinchey of New York, say the bill woud repeal a portion of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that exempted hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," from regulation under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

It must be only coincidence, but at the very time Democratic leaders are rounding up votes, leaning on undecideds and seeing if they can amend Waxman-Markey a tiny bit to accommodate some key voters' concerns, some Wall Street folks are practically pleading for it.

Not in so many words, perhaps, at least not in public. But big investor-types are throwing around the mantra that regulated utilities have invoked for years: regulatory certainty. If you want renewable energy development, they say, you have to define the playing field.

Certainly the financial community has held this view for a long time; it just seems to be reaching fever pitch right now, as the climate change/energy bill goes to a crucial stage tomorrow. It's hard to know how closely Wall Street lobbyists are working the issue, but one might assume they are making themselves felt.

Bart Chilton, arguably the most outspoken member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has once again come up with one of his infamous analogies relating pop culture to commodity markets -- this time equating the need to meld business operations and environmental stewardship with an episode of the popular 1990s US sitcom Seinfeld.