In a March 4 article, writer Michael Burnham of E&E News PM (subscription required) talks about the slow down in “clean energy” investments and what this might mean for reducing the carbon peak:

Investments in new wind farms and other “clean” energy projects are slowing with the crumbling global economy, and that could make climate change’s bite harder in the decades ahead, financial analysts warned today.

With coal-fired power plants, steel mills and cement kilns producing less, greenhouse gas emissions are falling in the short term, the London-based market analytics firm New Energy Finance says in a report today. But flat investment in lower-emission alternatives in the next two or three years — presumably the time it takes for economies to rebound — could push what the analysts dub “peak carbon” back by more than a decade.

Mel Brooks, in his classic comedy The Producers, schemed to make money by over-subscribing shares in a sure-to-fail play. Unfortunately for his character, the play became a smash hit, and all the investors wanted their payouts. Since he had sold well over 100% of the interest in the play, he was in a bit of a pickle.

And so it is with natural gas. Clean, easy to use, abundant—natural gas is everyone’s choice for our energy transition away from oil and coal for power generation, industry, homes, and now transportation. Enter oilman-turned-wind-promoter T. Boone Pickens, with a proposal to move U.S. heavy trucks strongly toward natural gas fuel (as compressed natural gas, or CNG). And to enable the offset, the electricity that is currently generated by such gas (about a 21% market share of power generation, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Annuel Energy Outlook 2009, Table 8) would be supplied by new wind farms, built mostly in the Plains States.…

Today, there is much more political science than science in the editorial content of the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS has become just another special-interest, at the trough of special government favor. So why not, for example, tilt toward exaggeration on big-money research issues like the prospective impact of the human influence on climate?

Recent evidence of the political nature of the scientific community was produced when Al Gore received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his presentation at the annual convention of AAAS in Chicago. Yet Gore has gone far beyond mainstream science to sound the climate alarm, and scientists know it. They just like his politics, because it allows them to act as rent-seekers rather than truth-seekers. Roger Pielke Jr.…

As reported by Russell Gold at Environmental Capital, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has made an incisive new argument against his company’s investing in government-dependent renewable energy.

“If I wanted to kill [tax subsidies], the thing to do is for Exxon Mobil to go and invest heavily in them and then Congress would immediately cancel the tax subsidy. Actually what they would do is they would just cancel it for us,” said Mr.Tillerson, during the annual analyst meeting at the New York Stock Exchange.

He added: “In reality, that is what I fear would happen. So we are not going to go into investments that are dependent on a government providing a tax system to make them viable.”

This is very interesting. Former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and now Tillerson have argued against investing in politically dependent renewables because they have been-there-done-that, with investor losses in the 1970s.…