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Richardson on the Record
Amanda Griscom Little, Grist
An interview with Bill Richardson about his presidential platform on energy and the environment
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Bill Richardson likes to play up his image as a horse-ridin’, gun-totin’ man of the Wild West, but don’t be distracted by the cowboy swagger — the Democratic governor of New Mexico also has a serious policy wonk side. That was on full display in May when he unveiled a broad and ambitious climate and energy plan. Billing himself as the “energy president,” he’s now calling for a 90 percent cut to greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, a renewable-energy target of 50 percent by 2040, and a 50-mile-per-gallon fuel-economy standard by 2020.
Richardson is no newcomer to energy issues, of course — he served as secretary of energy at the end of the Clinton administration, and has aggressively pushed clean energy as governor of New Mexico. But some greens might not care for his “clean coal” boosterism or his embrace of “all kinds of biofuel.”
I rang up the governor at his office in Santa Fe, N.M., to size up his energy and environmental vision. …
This is part of a series of interviews with presidential candidates produced jointly by Grist and Outside.
(6 August 2007)
The next energy crisis
Nicholas Varchaver, FORTUNE Magazine
More than a quarter of America’s oil flows through southern Louisiana. Too bad the land is slowly sinking into the sea.
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…Some 25 square miles of Louisiana have been collapsing into the gulf each year for three-quarters of a century. A total of 1,900 square miles, roughly the area of Delaware, disappeared between the 1930s and 2005, and another 217 square miles were pulverized into liquid by Katrina and Rita. And that land loss, says Ted Falgout, who has run Port Fourchon for 28 years, poses a growing threat not only to the people who live here but also to the U.S. energy supply.
“We’re on a train wreck here,” says Falgout. “We have not designed the energy infrastructure – or any infrastructure – [to handle land loss].”
The problem afflicts all of southern Louisiana. As land turns to water, it is exposing thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines that were built underground and were not designed to withstand water or waves.
(6 August 2007)
