Daily Policy Digest
Environment Issues
| Los Angeles Moves to Eliminate Reliance on Coal-Powered Energy The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is moving forward with a plan to end the city's reliance on coal-powered energy... |
| Earth Hour Will Harm Environment Earth Hour only addresses a small fraction of total energy consumption by asking participants to only turn off their lights while leaving heating, air conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone and other appliances out of the picture... |
| Green Cars: Not So Clean After All It costs 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission to produce an electric car, equal to about 80,000 miles of travel, yet it's only 14,000 pounds to build a conventional car... |
| Fracking Could Reduce Budget Deficit Increasing natural gas production would shrink our trade deficit and reduce the budget deficit, says Bob McTeer, a distinguished fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| Pesticide Unfairly Blamed for Bee Die-Offs There is limited evidence that new insecticides are the cause of the bee "die-offs" around the United States and Europe... |
| Plastic Bag Ban Leads to Increased Theft A January survey by Seattle Public Utilities reported that 21.1 percent of business owners believe an increase in shoplifting is due to the city's plastic bag ban... |
| California's Green Jobs: Where Did They Go? California's electricity prices are 39 percent higher than the national average and expected to rise when the state's renewable energy mandate kicks in... |
| Official Hybrid Gas Mileage Estimates May Be Overstated Hybrid vehicles are much more sensitive to driving habits and a hybrid that is driven aggressively might get far worse gas mileage than its window-sticker rating... |
| Gas Boom Projected to Grow for Decades U.S. shale-rock formations will provide a growing source of moderately priced natural gas through 2040, and decline only slowly after that... |
| Export Licensing Systems Slow Energy Growth With America set to become a net natural gas exporter by 2020 and virtually self-sufficient in energy by 2035, fossil fuel export restrictions and pending applications are limiting U.S. energy producers... |
