BusinessGreen

It’s fairly well-known that economic activity tends to track energy use. It follows that we can learn some interesting things about the economy by examining trends in energy use.

For example: the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) tracks electricity sales, and its data holds intriguing—and troubling—clues on the prospects for growth in the U.S. economy.

In the U.S., electricity sales grow at a steady 1-2 percent rate per year, with occasional troughs mapping to slowdowns in economic activity.

With the climate bill officially dead, there’s already a trickle of “who’s to blame and what they should have done differently” pieces. I expect it will soon become a flood.

Most of these pieces will focus in the wrong places. Take Lee Wasserman’s new op-ed, “Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill,” an instant classic of the genre. Wasserman doesn’t like the way Dems talked about the issue and he doesn’t like the policy framework they put forward, which is of course his right.

As global warming accelerates, the world will become not only hotter, flatter, and more crowded but also thirsty, according to a new study that finds 70 percent of counties in the United States may face climate change-related risks to their water supplies by 2050.

One-third of U.S. counties may find themselves at “high or extreme risk,” according to the report prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council by Tetra Tech, a California environmental consulting firm.

“It appears highly likely that climate change could have major impacts on the available precipitation and the sustainability of water withdrawals in future years under the business-as-usual scenario,” the study’s authors conclude.

At his keynote address to Netroots Nation last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was asked a question I had submitted (thanks, mcjoan!) about a key piece of energy policy: the renewable electricity standard. It’s right at the 30-minute mark in this video:

At 33:00, Reid gets to the point: “Right now, I don’t think I have 60 votes to get that done.” But what he says before that is something I’ve heard from several senators at the conference: it’s about time.