Fossil Fuels

I DON'T disagree with those who feel that a lack of publicity is in part responsible for the problems affecting NStar's renewable energy program. However, reporter David Abel has identified the main culprit: "falling fossil fuel prices. " Putting a price on carbon to make fossil fuels reflect their true negative costs to our health and environment would surely be the best way to stimulate interest, and investment, in renewable energy. It's the path America needs to take. D.R. Tucker Brockton READING "GREEN electricity finds few customers in Mass.

BONN, Germany - UN climate talks hit gridlock Thursday, as a widening rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some advances made last year in the decades-long effort to control carbon emissions that scientists say are overheating the planet. As so often in the slow-moving talks, the session in Bonn bogged down with disputes about technicalities. But at the heart of the discord was the larger issue of how to divide the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing nations.

GENEVA -- Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitat for farmland, and exploitation of the oceans are destroying earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group World Wildlife Fund warned yesterday. The biggest consumers of nonrenewable natural resources are the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Kuwait, Australia, and Sweden, who leave the biggest "ecological footprint," the group said in a report. Humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the planet can produce, the report said.

I DON'T disagree with those who feel that a lack of publicity is in part responsible for the problems affecting NStar's renewable energy program. However, reporter David Abel has identified the main culprit: "falling fossil fuel prices. " Putting a price on carbon to make fossil fuels reflect their true negative costs to our health and environment would surely be the best way to stimulate interest, and investment, in renewable energy. It's the path America needs to take. D.R. Tucker Brockton READING "GREEN electricity finds few customers in Mass.

JEFF JACOBY seems to think that since global warming can occur from natural events, excluding human contributions, we ought not be concerned with the effects due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Jacoby trumpets the view that since life flourished long ago when carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today, we have nothing to worry about. How silly. Life that flourished then did not live in cities that would be flooded, nor was that life dependent on agriculture that would be destroyed by climate change.

PETER S. Canellos posits that Massachusetts could be a more effective participant in the national dialogue with a Republican senator ("Brown's uniquely powerful position," Op-ed, Nov. 5). While Scott Brown may have the potential to bridge our country's partisan divides, my recent experience with his office indicates that he doesn't have the interest, particularly as it relates to energy policy. I am a member of Citizens Climate Lobby, a grass-roots advocacy organization that supports revenue-neutral, free-market-based solutions to wean our country off of fossil fuels.

President Obama laid out an ambitious goal in his latest State of the Union address: By 2035, America will get 80 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources. Achievable? Maybe, if you consider that Obama’s expansive definition of clean energy includes nuclear and emerging clean coal technologies, which many environmentalists don’t embrace as ways to combat greenhouse gases. A less obvious question is whether mutual fund investors will have the patience to stick with green investing principles that have recently left them in the red. The stocks of renewable...

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii -- Carbon dioxide, the gas seen largely responsible for global warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian volcano. The reason for the faster buildup of the most important "greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the US government specialists say. "But the big picture is that CO2 is continuing to go up," said Russell Schnell, deputy director of the National...

WASHINGTON -- Oil prices will persist near or above $50 a barrel for years and force a shift to more fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels, the government said yesterday, discarding earlier predictions that costs would drop to around $30 a barrel. The Energy Department forecast was more positive on natural gas prices. It said they would retreat from the recent spikes -- to more than $14 per thousand cubic feet -- and settle at under $5 in the long term as demand weakens, especially for electricity production.

‘‘NSTAR TO test A123's storage cell" (Business, Dec. 19) straightforwardly reports on the company's plans to test A123's grid-scale storage systems. However, an industry researcher's statement that "the lack of cheap energy storage is what is continuing the natural gas and coal paradigm" is a significant overstatement. Our continued dependence on natural gas and coal continues because these fuels are not priced to account for the costs their use imposes on society. These costs include human health problems caused by air pollution from the burning of coal;...

‘‘NSTAR TO test A123's storage cell" (Business, Dec. 19) straightforwardly reports on the company's plans to test A123's grid-scale storage systems. However, an industry researcher's statement that "the lack of cheap energy storage is what is continuing the natural gas and coal paradigm" is a significant overstatement. Our continued dependence on natural gas and coal continues because these fuels are not priced to account for the costs their use imposes on society. These costs include human health problems caused by air pollution from the burning of coal; damage to land from...

Mount Abram in Greenwood is going all green to heat its ski lodge. The western Maine ski resort is using locally produced wood pellets, and no fossil fuels, to warm up its lodge. Mount Abram has taken delivery of a wood-pellet boiler that will heat the 5,500-square-foot base lodge using wood pellets delivered from a local distribution center. It means Mount Abram will no longer require 12,000 gallons of No. 2 heating oil per year to heat its lodge. Mount Abram says the new boiler is the first installed at a ski area by Maine Energy Systems, the renewable heating company founded by...

THE WEAKNESSES and the ironies of American energy policy were on display in Washington last month, as a House committee grilled Energy Secretary Steven Chu over a federal loan guarantee to a now-bankrupt solar-technology company called Solyndra. The guarantee to California-based Solyndra is in line with the Obama administration's broader strategy — anathema to oil-state Republicans — of promoting the growth of the American clean-energy industry. But Solyndra's subsequent failure isn't a sign that the administration has gone too far; rather, it's a sign that Congress,...

PETER S. Canellos posits that Massachusetts could be a more effective participant in the national dialogue with a Republican senator ("Brown's uniquely powerful position," Op-ed, Nov. 5). While Scott Brown may have the potential to bridge our country's partisan divides, my recent experience with his office indicates that he doesn't have the interest, particularly as it relates to energy policy. I am a member of Citizens Climate Lobby, a grass-roots advocacy organization that supports revenue-neutral, free-market-based solutions to wean our country off of fossil fuels.

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly. The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

THERE COULD be a place for wood-burning power plants in Massachusetts, but not until the biomass power industry establishes new ways of producing energy that waste fewer trees and spew less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is the message the Patrick administration is expected to send when it releases new regulations for the biomass industry this fall. Both the biomass industry and environmental groups have expressed dissatisfaction over drafts of the regulations, but the proposals stake out a wise position for the state - ensuring that...

Bill McKibben, probably the nation’s leading environmentalist, argues in “Eaarth’’ that we have already so thoroughly altered the physical features of the planet (to an extent that he has renamed it with an extra “a’’) that we must start preparing for a radically simplified lifestyle. Important strands of environmental thought merge in McKibben’s new book, making for some truly scary reading and prompting urgent questions about the nature of the environmental catastrophe at hand.

I don't know how things are in your life. But no matter what's going on, this planet has got you beat. We've made it sick, and it, in turn, is sick and tired of us. We have the floods, fires, droughts, heat waves, melting ice caps, and endangered or extinct species to prove it. "The 11th Hour," the exhaustively depressing documentary (there's no dressing this up) that brings us this news, has the misfortune to be yet another global warming warning. But the word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is...

JEFF JACOBY seems to think that since global warming can occur from natural events, excluding human contributions, we ought not be concerned with the effects due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Jacoby trumpets the view that since life flourished long ago when carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today, we have nothing to worry about. How silly. Life that flourished then did not live in cities that would be flooded, nor was that life dependent on agriculture that would be destroyed by climate change.