In the Pipeline: 8/6/13

Do you think the protesters drove there?

Reuters (8/4/13) reports: “Police arrested more than 200 demonstrators for trespassing at Chevron Corp in the California city of Richmond on Saturday to mark the one-year anniversary of a massive refinery fire and to protest a proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The arrests came as a throng of sunflower-carrying picketers chanted, ‘Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go,’ as people of all ages walked onto Chevron’s property to draw attention to a growing movement against fossil fuel. Police Captain Mark Gagan said the arrests, all peaceful, included three people in wheelchairs and demonstrators as young as 18 years old. Media reports said most of those arrested were cited and released. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who is leading a call for using only renewable energy, was one of the first to be handcuffed.”

This is why FERC and Binz matter.

The Miami Herald (8/5/13) reports. “The windswept prairies of the Midwest are undergoing an energy transformation the electric grid can’t handle. Wind turbines tower over rural vistas in the heartland, where the clean energy source is becoming increasingly popular with utility companies that face state-mandated renewable energy standards. Unfortunately, the nation’s aging power grid is hampering those efforts. At the end of last year, installed wind-generation capacity totaled 60 gigawatts nationwide – 5 percent of the nation’s production capacity – according to data from the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Another 135 gigawatts of potential wind production awaits development and connection to the grid, according to industry data.”

Fancy that, we can drill our way out of the problem.

Energy Guardian (8/6/13) reports: “The price of domestic oil has steadily risen this year to about the same as that of imports. Yet the price of a gallon of gas has stayed well below the record of $4.11 a gallon set in the summer of 2008. Why? U.S. pump prices tend to rise and fall based on the world spot price, reflected in the North Sea Brent crude benchmark set in London. The good news for consumers has come because Brent prices have been held in check by stronger U.S. output and better transportation to refiners, according to the Energy Department.”

Attack energy production, modern life, and our standard of living as much as you want, but if you use global warming to threaten our ability to grill real meat? You’ve crossed a line, this is blasphemy.

Bloomberg (8/5/13) reports: “The world’s first beef burger created from stem cells has a texture that’s closer to cake than steak. The burger, fried in a public unveiling in London today, lacks the fattiness of regular meat and could be described as an ‘animal-protein cake,’ according to Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based author and one of two tasting volunteers. The 5-ounce burger, which cost more than 250,000 euros ($332,000) to produce, was developed by Mark Post of Maastricht University with funding from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Post is among scientists including those at Modern Meadow and New Harvest who are experimenting with ways to grow meat in labs as an alternative to raising livestock, which contributes 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and uses 30 percent of the world’s ice-free land, according to an Oxford University study.”