Your car may drive the same no matter where you live. But the costs are different matter altogether. The price of everything from gasoline to muffler repairs varies wildly across the country. Here are the average costs of repairs, insurance premiums, gasoline and taxes and fees in all 50 states, according to Bankrate’s first Car Cost Index. The costs are ranked from highest to lowest.
California’s fight against climate change has, so far, proved popular with voters. But among businesses, it’s a very different story.
While some support the state’s policies to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, others emphatically don’t. Manufacturers and oil companies in particular have sought to delay, alter or kill some of those policies, saying they will push electricity and gasoline prices through the roof.
Electricity consumption per capita in California stopped increasing in the 1970s, around the same time policymakers had also enacted stricter energy-efficiency policies, such as mandates on buildings and appliances. As electricity consumption continued to rise in other states, regulation advocates hailed California as a role model for the rest of the nation. But according to an economist at Georgetown University, California’s savings are largely due to other long-run trends.
The rapid replacement of coal by cheaper and cleaner natural gas has helped drive emissions down in the United States more than any other country in the world in recent years. Cheap nautral gas is crushing domestic demand for coal and is the main reason for the rapid decline in US carbon emissions. The gas revolution offers a way for the United States and other nations to replace coal burning while accelerating the transition to zero-carbon energy.
California is reconsidering landmark consumer protections and energy conservation measures that were written into residential utility bills during the state’s 2000-2001 energy crisis.
A project that would have included a solar power station and a million-square-foot solar panel factory a few miles from the California state line won’t be built, its backers announced last month. The $5 billion, Chinese-backed ENN Mojave Energy project at the southernmost corner of Nevada couldn’t find utilities that wanted to buy its power, either in Nevada or across the line in California.
When wind or solar energy displace conventional generation, the reduction in emissions varies dramatically across the United States. Although the Southwest has the greatest solar resource, a solar panel in New Jersey displaces significantly more sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter than a panel in Arizona, resulting in 15 times more health and environmental benefits. A wind turbine in West Virginia displaces twice as much carbon dioxide as the same turbine in California.
Starting in the 1970s California’s residential electricity consumption per capita stopped increasing, while other states’ electricity use continued to grow steadily. Similar patterns can be seen in non-electric energy, industry, and transportation. What accounts for California’s apparent energy savings?
Nobody likes high gas prices — or taxes — and Californians are about to get hit with both when a 3.5-cent increase in the state gasoline tax kicks in Monday.
Though the Obama administration has recently renewed its commitment to approve more wind facilities on public lands as part of the Climate Action Plan it released this week, a new study indicates that wind development in California has far fewer benefits than it does elsewhere in the United States.
With Friday’s cancellation of one of the biggest solar projects proposed for the California desert, the utility-scale solar boom of 2009 continues to falter. And analysts deep in the energy industry are taking notice.
The developer of a huge proposed solar power project that was once slated to cover 12.5 square miles of still-intact desert habitat has walked away from the idea, according to documents released by the California Energy Commission (CEC). The Calico Solar Project, proposed for land north of Interstate 40 between the hamlets of Ludlow and Newberry Springs, attracted opposition even from die-hard supporters of desert solar projects.
In the movie Thelma and Louise, the two hapless heroines clasp hands and hurl their turquois Thunderbird over a cliff and into an abyss of certain death. It’s become an iconic moment in American film, a noble if extreme solution when all hope is lost.
OSTERATH’S 12,000 citizens are angry. Their quiet backwater in the Ruhr, close to Düsseldorf, is the proposed site for the biggest converter station in Europe. This vast installation will transform high-voltage direct current to alternating current.
The permanent closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant leaves significant unanswered questions about the future of the energy supply in Southern California, the head of the state’s Public Utilities Commission acknowledged Tuesday.