The UK’s low-carbon strategy is all about keeping the cost down

Markets: Oil dips as commodities consolidate

Severn tidal power schemes: prepare for a dust-up

China-US climate talks: where the media coverage matters

An Apollo-style energy programme

‘Clean coal’ moves forward in the US

US domestic drilling falls, hitting small companies

Not a fun place to be a commodities executive right now
Further reading:

An EU delegation plans to check out carbon targets in China’s next two five-year plans (Cop15)

George Monbiot is cross because the UK government’s thousands of pages of low-carbon plans didn’t once mention peak oil (Guardian)

Companies that paint roofs white having no luck getting US stimulus funds (Infratructurist)

EPRI chief argues that a national US grid upgrade is unnecessary, although regional and local upgrades are (Technology Review)

Low-carbon ETFs (SeekingAlpha)

It’s 10pm. Do you know where your trash (or for that matter, rubbish) is? (CNet)

Zenn takes a bigger stake in ‘stealthy’ ultracapacitor maker EEStor (Cleantech.com)

John Kerry hits back at Sarah Palin’s anti-cap-and-trade oped (Huffington Post)

Something large, black and gooey in the water…  (Anchorage Daily News)

Are the US efforts to persuade China to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions falling on deaf ears?

The visit by US energy secretary Steven Chu and commerce secretary Gary Locke to Beijing follows several visits by other high level officials including Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern, but The New York Times described Hu and Locke gave ‘by far the strongest criticisms yet, and the clearest demands that China take action’. The newspaper said Hu pointed out that China would emit more in the next thirty years than the US has in its entire history, if current growth rates continue.

Even more sharply, Locke said: ““Fifty years from now, we do not want the world to lay the blame for environmental catastrophe at the feet of China.”

There are two historical analogies for big US government spending on energy R&D floating around this month. One is the Carter administration analogy: a new Democratic administration spends on renewables as a way to tackle the energy prices and security following an oil price shock. It is comprehensively explored in this month’s issue of The Atlantic and debated in the National Journal’s weekly energy series.

The other, amid calls for an ‘Apollo programme of energy’, is the anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.

The small oil and gas companies that account for most US production are still under pressure, regardless of how good the price of oil looks compared to a few months ago. That is because most of their business is in natural gas, and the curiously low price of natural gas makes it more expensive to drill than not.

Barclays Capital Research noted in a new report that it was but one year ago that natural gas was flying high, closing above $13.50/MMBtu in early July. Now, natural gas prices are closer to the $3.50 level.

The American Petroleum Institute said in a report this week that natural gas domestic drilling was down 43 per cent in the second quarter of 2009 from the year-earlier quarter – the most severe quarterly decline this decade. And API is not the only one publishing dour numbers.