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Reducing Emissions

What does it mean to be green?

Posted: September 9, 2010 by Ken Cohen

As policymakers and the public discuss ways to help stimulate our economy, the effort to create green jobs has been getting a lot of attention. But what exactly does it mean to be green? The government has been trying to create a definition that will guide funding for green jobs, but this is still up for debate.

David Sandalow, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for policy and international affairs, said in a Huffington Post article about electric vehicles on Tuesday that “It’s strange that we are utterly dependent on [gasoline] for mobility.” But in a market-based economy, it’s not “strange” that petroleum-based products remain the transportation fuel of choice; it’s a century of real-world economics.


On Monday, the London Times published a story that had all the elements of a good conspiracy — except for the facts. In a front-page story with the alarmist headline “Oil giant gave £1 million to fund climate skeptics,” they repeated the tired theory that ExxonMobil is funding climate change skeptics, implying that we are at the hub of a vast global conspiracy. The basis for this claim? Our support for a list of organizations that the reporter chose to omit from the story.

As we continue to debate policy options related to energy and the environment in the United States, a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a timely message about the growing importance of natural gas. To substantially curb carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions through 2050, the study says, the lowest-cost policy option would lead to a shift toward natural gas, particularly for power generation.


Articles in The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News and others have noted that ExxonMobil’s agreement with XTO Energy, completed last week, highlights the expanding role of natural gas in general, and supplies of so-called “unconventional” natural gas in particular. That’s true, for several reasons. But first, I’d like to point out that the term “unconventional gas” is often misunderstood.



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