Tesla reports profit

Tesla Motors, the electric car company, announced on Wednesday reported net income of $11.2 million, Tesla reported revenue of $561.8 million on record sales of 4,900 of its top-of-the-line Model S sedans. That surpassed the company's forecast by more than 250 vehicles and prompted the automaker to raise its 2013 forecast. It now expects to sell about 21,000 of its Model S vehicles by the end of this year. 

Climate News

Shell Oil's CTO says that "the time of easy oil and gas is gone" as the drillers look for new technology enabling them to extract oil from extremely deep and scalding water in the Gulf. [Houston Chronicle's Fuel Fix]

Exxon will spend $4 billion to develop the "technically challenging" oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. [Bloomberg]

Senator Lisa Murkowski is pushing the Interior Department to clearly and quickly issue regulations on Arctic drilling as spring starts and the ice continues to melt. [The Hill]

The American Petroleum Institute is pushing the EPA to slow down regulations on sulfur emissions from automobiles. [The Hill]

Progressive and environmental groups are pulling their Facebook ads over the revelations that Mark Zuckerberg's political group has been airing pro-Keystone and Arctic drilling ads. [Politico]

As hurricane season approaches, President Obama meets with electric utility officials today to discuss what everyone has learned since Sandy. [The Hill]

Vice President Joe Biden tells an activist that he he was in the minority in the Administration, but he agrees Keystone should not be approved. [Buzzfeed]

Radioactive water leaks into Lake Michigan

The Palisades Nuclear Power Plant was shut down after officials discovered a growing leak in a water storage tank the previous day. Safety investigators reported that 79 gallons of radioactive water from the 250,000-gallon tank leaked into a basin holding thousands of gallons of nonradioactive water. The same tank sprang a leak in 2012.

The plant is in Van Buren County's Covert Township. It has been under heightened attention from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of a series of breakdowns over two years.

The leak rate went from about 1 gallon on Friday to about 90 gallons Saturday, leading to the shutdown.

Palisades is owned by New Orleans-based Entergy. It has been shut down nine times since September 2011.

[Detroit Free Press]

Why Climate Change is not an Environmental Issue

Washington Monthly's Ryan Louis Cooper makes the case that climate change is not an environmental issue. Interesting perspective.

He does a good job underlining the reality that while climate change does concern the environment, it concerns a lot more than that:

"I'm not saying that climate change isn't a major threat to the current biosphere (it definitely is), nor am I saying that other species don't have moral worth, but the point is that there is not some kind of easy trade-off between humanity and nature. When we dammed Glen Canyon to create Lake Powell, it was a monstrous crime against all that is sacred, but we humans continued to live our lives largely without disruption. Climate change, on the other hand, is a direct, existential threat to the biosphere AND all of human civilization. It's just too big to fit into something like environmentalism."

Wind power lowers costs and greenhouse gas emissions

New report finds that wind energy in the mid-Atlantic region will lower electricity prices, save ratepayer's $6.9 billion dollars, and lower greenhouse gas emissions to help fight climate change by 14%.

Adding more wind power to the grid in the PJM region can lower gas and coal consumption and reduce regional wholesale energy market prices, saving nearly $7 billion per year in the mid-2020s, according to a new study conducted by Synapse Energy Economics on behalf of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG). The report found that doubling the wind generation already planned in the region would lower fuel costs and drive down prices by $1.74 per megawatt hour (MWh) in the largest wholesale competitive energy market in the world, PJM, which includes all or parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C. The savings also extend into the regions interconnected with PJM.

http://cleanenergytransmission.org/library/detail.php?id=178

Mountain of Tar Sands Waste builds in Detroit

The Koch Brothers are building a mountain of tar sands waste in Detroit. [NY Times]

Detroit residents are now see a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River where they used to see lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. 

Detroit's ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada's tar sands boom.

And no one knows what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.

30 Million Flee their homes in 2012

A new report shows that over 30 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by climate-related extreme weather disasters … [Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre Publications]

It is increasingly likely that hundreds of millions of people per year will be displaced from their homelands in the near future as a result of global warming. 


That must be what Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil means when he says "We'll adapt."

"Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around -- we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions," Tillerson said. 

Bill McKibben comments - "Crop production areas are what folks from Vermont call farms."