We laid to rest Sarah Anne yesterday afternoon in the Davis Grove Cemetery yesterday afternoon amongst the oaks that reside at the family plot. Her body was entombed next to Eric's, her husband for 53 years.

In a revealing snapshot of what keeps utility executives awake at night, a survey of industry leaders found that more than 90 percent of survey respondents think federal carbon constraints will be implemented by 2014, while 75 percent think they will have to make major demand-driven investments in new baseload generation by 2011--well before the final shape of the carbon rules is clear.

Reconciling these conflicting climate and generation capacity timelines is the biggest challenge facing the industry today, concludes GF Energy in its 2007 Electricity Outlook, the latest in a regular series of surveys performed since 1992 by the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm.

Sponsored by the American Public Power Association, Canadian Electricity Association, Edison Electric Institute, Electric Power Research Institute and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, the survey reflects interviews conducted from late April to late May with 97 senior executives, including 65 utility chief executive officers in the United States and Canada.

"Global climate and the imminent need for new electricity capacity are the new industry drivers," GF Energy said in a report summarizing the survey responses and released in mid-June. "Reconciling growth in demand--even after real improvements in efficiency--while reducing carbon is the industry's challenge. Industry executives concur that this is not just an environmental issue. It is a boundary-breaking driver."

The survey found that the imminent arrival of climate change legislation--and the uncertainty about what form the carbon regulations will take--are at the top of the list of CEO concerns in 2007 and have replaced wholesale and retail competition as issues most likely to divide the industry.

"Since 1992, when we began surveying the senior executive opinions, there has never been a more transformational year," the report said. "Until now, competition--preference for and opposition to--has been the main industry driver, the litmus test by which we assessed utilities.

"Now we are entering an era which will also divide utilities between those most likely to benefit from a carbon-constrained world and those facing challenges that could lead to more industry consolidation."

While it comes as no surprise that utilities have not reached a consensus on what form carbon regulations should take, the depth of disagreement is profound. Some 32 percent of respondents think that an emissions cap with allowance trading and a cap on allowance prices, or "safety valve," would be the most sensible approach.

Another 20 percent said they prefer a cap and trade system with no cap on allowance prices. Voluntary programs--the approach strongly preferred by the Bush administration and enthusiastically embraced by the industry for the last 15 years--are seen as no longer viable. Voluntary programs were seen as the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about one percent of the survey respondents.

Surprisingly, 25 percent of the respondents told GF Energy they think a carbon tax makes the most sense. However, only one utility, FPL Group, has publicly endorsed a carbon tax, and most lawmakers in Congress see a carbon tax as politically impossible to achieve.

"I think a lot of them, if they had their way, would like to have a carbon tax, because that takes the pressure off them almost entirely and passes it to the end use customer," GF Energy Chief Executive Officer Roger Gale told The Energy Daily Thursday.

While no consensus has emerged on the best regulatory approach, utility officials clearly agree on what technologies are best for reducing emissions. End-use energy efficiency and new nuclear generation, at 75 percent and 74 percent, respectively, topped respondents' list of technology strategies, followed closely by carbon dioxide capture and storage (69 percent) and renewable energy (68 percent).

Roughly half of the respondents said integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants (55 percent), ultra-supercritical boilers (49 percent) and new efficient pulverized coal plants are important climate change technology strategies.

However, executives in every region but the South displayed a surprising pessimism about the likelihood of new generation investments in coal under federal carbon constraints-- primarily because of uncertainty about the performance and availability of carbon capture and storage technology.

While 62 percent of respondents said coal will provide either a moderate or substantial amount of new generation, more than three-quarters (76 percent) said they expected a resurgence in natural gas-fired generation to meet new demand, followed closely by small renewables (75 percent.)

Interestingly, executives in all parts of the country except the South think that natural gas is the most likely of new generation investments, while executives in the South are far more confident than elsewhere in the United States that new nuclear generation will be built to meet demand. The respondents overwhelmingly agreed that that regulatory uncertainties, high costs and public acceptance remain the biggest hurdles for new nuclear generation.

The survey also revealed that utility executives see climate change regulation driving broad new investment in demand-response technologies that give end-users more control over how they manage their use of electricity, but think the emergence of these technologies will not be widely seen for at least a decade.

In other interesting findings, a majority of respondents said that if Congress approves legislation during the next three years, the legislation will hit utilities harder than the transportation sector (78 percent) and that the United States will act independently to address climate change (57 percent). Only 22 percent think that if the Congress acts on global warming in the next three years the United States will join an international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Less than half--46 percent--said they think the current Congress will approve a renewable portfolio standard to require utilities to obtain a percentage of their electricity from wind, solar or other renewable resources.

Can you trust Al Gore's scientific claims in support of global warmism? Not if this passage from a Gore op-ed in Sunday's New York Times is any indication:

Consider this tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground--having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years--and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere.

As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees. True, Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, but the fault is not in our star; Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. It's the carbon dioxide.

As blogger George Reisman notes, the atmosphere on Mars is 95% carbon dioxide, just shy of Venus's 96%. (The Earth's atmosphere, by contrast, is less than 0.04% CO2.) Average temperature on Mars? Eighty-one below zero.

Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reports:

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.

If scientists have such difficulty predicting past weather, surely we should be skeptical about politicians' predictions of future weather.

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For about 9 years I and my partners did a conservative radio show talk and several times I was reminded that equal time to all sides was required because of the fairness doctrine in broadcasting. We complied to this the best we could. Since our show was un-audited, fairness was never exact. Someone might have a minute or two or five more than someone else because of commercial breaks or the lack of.

With the democratic controlled congress this rather expensive exercise in so called fairness may get revisited once more with radio, the lest expensive of good broadcast initiatives, will certainly be whacked away at.

Police in Cape Town, South Africa, are conducting a "high-level investigation" into the conduct of officers who recovered a stolen bakkie (pickup truck). An officer had pulled the truck over, and the driver ran. The truck was impounded -- and then stolen from the police impound lot. But the thieves were so nervous they crashed the truck, and security guards were able to get it back.

Hours later it was stolen again from the yard; one of the thieves waved at a security guard as they drove away. The investigation will probably prove to be difficult: no one at the impound lot ever bothered to write down the truck's license number.

Microsoft Corp. plans to open a software development center in Vancouver, British Columbia, later this year, partly as a way to recruit and retain talented workers who can't get into or stay in the U.S. because of immigration laws.

The following was forwarded to me from a friend that participated in a 4th gathering for Ron Paul. I thought maybe you would like to see the effort to discredit Dr. Paul by attacking those that support him. There are apparently a couple of post undermining Dr. Paul. Needless to say, Neo-Conservatives are starting to feel rather intimidated by proactive diligence.

Congratulations Crew!

Blue Collar Republican

By the way Ron Paul will be on ABC News this Sunday for 15 minutes and will be interviewed by ABC News' Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos this Sunday, July 8, on the program "This Week".

May God Bless and  Keep You This Day Till Tomorrow