"The fossil fuels industry may face 'dark days ahead,' while alternative energy sectors are likely to flourish, because of the election of Barack Obama, Ian Talley writes for Dow Jones Newswires, quoting the outgoing president of the American Petroleum Institute. Coal interests also trembled, "concerned that Obama's pursuit of stringent greenhouse-gas laws could strangle the industry."
Talley writes, "Although it will take years to engineer and implement, an Obama administration energy and environment policy marks a tectonic shift for the nation. He would move the U.S. away from petroleum as its primary energy source and towards renewable energy, advanced biofuels, efficiency and low greenhouse-gas-emitting technologies."
Obama and John McCain, who remains in the Senate, both favor a "cap and trade" system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, but Obama said his plan "would be more aggressive than any other cap-and-trade system proposed," Talley reports. He says Obama is unlikely to move quickly on that, but "is expected to start working piecemeal towards a climate-change bill early in his tenure." He has said that his bill "would encourage carbon capture and sequestration for coal-fired power plants," but that technology has not been commercialized. (Read more)
Final-weekend reports about Obama saying his cap-and-trade plan would put new coal-fired power plants at the risk of bankruptcy appeared to hurt him in the Appalachian coal field, where his comment was misrepresented as bankrupting the coal industry. Keith Strange of The Coalfield Progress in Norton, Va., and The Post in Big Stone Gap reports.
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