Senate Defeats Bill on Keystone XL Pipeline in Narrow Vote

Here are some of the stories we’re reading this morning.

Julia Pyper November 19, 2014

Julia Pyper

Senior Editor
Greentech Media

Julia Pyper is a Senior Editor at Greentech Media covering the energy transition. She is also the host and producer of the Political Climate podcast. She previously reported for E&E Publishing, and has covered clean energy and climate change issues across the U.S. and abroad, including in India, Haiti, Israel and the Maldives. She holds degrees from McGill and Columbia Universities. Find her on Twitter @JMPyper.

New York Times: Senate Defeats Bill on Keystone XL Pipeline in Narrow Vote

Senate Democrats, by a single vote, stopped legislation that would have approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, one of the most fractious and expensive battles of the Obama presidency.

The vote represented a victory for the environmental movement, but the fight had taken on larger dimensions as a proxy war between Republicans, who argued that the project was vital for job creation, and President Obama, who had delayed a decision on building it.

The vote was also a reflection of how a once-obscure pipeline blew up into a national political battle between environmentalists and the oil industry. Although the TransCanada company proposed the pipeline in 2005, it generated so little attention that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was poised to approve it in 2011 with little fanfare.

Politico: The Greening of Barack Obama

During his earlier years in office, Obama never pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. The economy took precedence. Then health care. At one point, toward the end of Obama’s first term, environmentalists counted the months between presidential uses of the term “climate change.”

But now, Obama is aiming to make global reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions one of the signature achievements of his presidency -- with his “historic agreement” with China last week just the start of a series of administrative actions aimed at combating climate change.

San Diego Union Tribune: Here's Who Wants to Sell You Solar, and Why

Rooftop solar companies are morphing into quasi-utilities as they sign up hundreds of thousands of customers to buy green energy for decades to come.

Leading the way is SolarCity, which has seized one-third of the booming household solar market and booked $4.1 billion in future payments from its customers.

RTCC: Dutch Wind Farm to Power Google Data Center

Google has bought the output of an entire Dutch wind farm to fuel its new €600 million ($752 million) data center in the Netherlands.

ClimateWire: Will the Most Common Molecule in the Universe Be the Fuel of the Future?

Now, after decades of development, hydrogen is about to find its way into the family car. One benefit is that fuel-cell vehicles bring tailpipe emissions down to zero, so tightening auto emission standards will be less of a problem for automakers.

The downside, at least for a while, is that although hydrogen is the most abundant molecule in the universe, hydrogen-dispensing pumps and the supply chains that feed them are still almost nonexistent.

Vox: NASA Found a Way to Visualize the Most Important Process Behind Global Warming

Each year, the world's cars, trucks, power plants, and factories emit billions of tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So where does it all go?

This mesmerizing new animation from NASA simulates a year in the life of carbon dioxide -- the gas primarily responsible for global warming -- in the atmosphere.