The storm’s latest projected path, according to the National Hurricane Center, marks a potential landfall stretching from the edge of Texas to the Florida panhandle. Louisiana is smack in the middle, with lots of bad memories. From Bloomberg:

“The forecasts have Gustav heading for Louisiana, which is very bad news,” said Peter Beutel, president of energy consultant Cameron Hanover Inc. in New Canaan, Connecticut. “If the storm track holds, this could shape up to be an untimely repeat of Hurricane Katrina. The damage caused by Katrina is in the collective consciousness of everyone who trades.”

The question now is how Gustav and other storms are going to affect oil prices. Our colleagues at Market Beat argue that without serious damage to drilling and refining infrastructure, oil will spike and then settle back down to $115 pretty quickly. Soft demand for gasoline could get even weaker as people recall the 2005 supply disruptions and gas-price spikes after Hurricane Katrina. That, Market Beat says, could actually mean even lower oil prices—the opposite of what the market is betting on.

Then again, as President Bush said while touting offshore drilling, psychology moves energy markets. Will Gustav’s storm clouds be enough to bring the oil bulls back?

Working overtime (AP)

Those credits have never lapsed, but they expire at the end of this year. Earlier in the year, renewable-energy types were pretty sanguine about the prospects of renewal. Now, panic is setting in—it seems like Congress and clean energy are playing a high-stakes game of chicken, with just three months left to swerve.

In the very short term, that can seem like a good thing. Wind- and solar-power developers are going gangbusters to get their goods in the ground while the tax credits are still on the table. Both solar and wind are on pace for record years. Wind power in particular is zooming: There are 8,000 megawatts under construction right now, or about 40% as much as all the wind power ever installed in the U.S.

But the outlook for next year and beyond is still bleak. The breakneck pace of construction right now is raising costs for wind power, the American Wind Energy Association says, and that will be passed onto consumers. The whole clean-energy ecosystem, from investors to manufacturers to developers, is on tenterhooks to see what will happen with the credits.

Of course, that’s not necessarily the fault of the Democrats who control Congress. Sen. John McCain famously missed the decisive vote on renewing the tax credits earlier this year, and missed another vote after that.

But it does explain why, as California senator Barbara Boxer said last night in Denver, “In the Senate, 60 is the new 50!”. Sixty Demcratic senators is a filibuster-proof majority. That means policy ideas turn into policies. Which is why some observers, like the WSJ edit page, figure the most important votes this election season won’t necessarily come at the top of the ticket—Obama versus McCain—but at the Congressional level.

With 60 Democratic senators, clean-energy advocates like Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell may just get their wish: permanent tax credits for renewable energy.

Keep your hard hat (AP)

Sure, it’s a way to wean off foreign oil and clean up the environment, as keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia said. But the drumbeat throughout was clean energy’s potential ability to create role high-paying, outsource-proof jobs for American workers. Five million of them, to be precise—that’s the Obama campaign’s promise for “green collar” jobs that will be created by diving wholeheartedly into renewable energy.

Hillary Clinton, who championed “green jobs” legislation in the Senate and hammered the theme on the campaign trail, urged support for Sen. Barack Obama precisely for that reason: “He’ll transform our energy agenda by creating millions of green jobs and building a new, clean energy future.”

Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius, a big-time opponent of coal power and a one-time darkhorse for the VP slot, matched T. Boone Pickens’ enthusiasm for turning the American midwest into a clean-energy paradise:

We know that the fuel for our future can be found in the grasses and crops that grow, year after year, on our fertile prairies. The energy for tomorrow is there in the clean, renewable power of the steady winds that blow across our fields. Investing in American energy will create 5 million green jobs—jobs that will revitalize many of our rural communities. Jobs that can never be outsourced to a foreign supplier.

Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who’s already turned his state into a magnet for renewable-energy investment from overseas, showed a laser focus on clean energy and green jobs:

[Obama] will invest $150 billion over the next decade to grow our energy supply and put 5 million Americans to work building solar and wind farms, clean coal gasification and geothermal plants, the kind of jobs that can’t be outsourced to India or China […] One person who understands what this can mean is a Pennsylvanian named Troy Galloway. Troy is a 44-year-old steelworker who was laid off after working for 15 years for the same company. But today, Troy is working in Pennsylvania for one of the largest wind energy companies in the world, and he’s earning as much as he earned at the steel mill. Troy’s new employer has more than 1,000 Pennsylvanians working green-collar jobs that pay well and have a future.

Gov. Rendell is presumably talking about Gamesa, the big Spanish wind-turbine maker that recently opened several Pennsylvania factories. But his anecdote reveals a couple of problems with the idea that “green jobs” will be a panacea. Pennsylvania, as he noted, has been a green-jobs pioneer, and yet the wind-turbine plant only employs 1,000 people. Reaching the 5 million mark will require an awful lot of factories nationwide in a lot of different sectors.

And at least some of those jobs aren’t new—they just replace lost jobs at the steel mills and the like. That’s why fussy economists always ask about new “net” job creation from the green-collar stampede. Replacing rust-belt jobs with green-collar jobs doesn’t alter the overall employment picture—it just shifts employment around.

Still, now that the sputtering economy is forefront on voters’ minds, any plan that can preserve, if not necessarily create, jobs seems likely to win votes in November.

The poll — the first-ever joint effort between the Health Blog and WSJ’s Environmental Capital blog — followed a WSJ story that looked at how the nation’s economic woes could affect Obama’s economic policy agenda. In the end, with more than 300 votes cast, our readers overwhelmingly favored stabilizing the economy before moving on to other issues:

Energy is stealing into the limelight in Denver. Grist has video interviews with a couple of titans of U.S. energy policy, Darryl Hannah and Sen. Jeff Bingaman. Hannah wants to end the fossil-fuel addiction, while Sen. Bingaman urges a pragmatic approach to U.S. climate policy. Disappointed climate change isn’t getting more play at this convention? Just wait until next week, says Joe Romm at Climate Progress. That’s because the new Republican platform waters down language on global warming, at AP. Energy Outlook explains why suing the EPA to regulate refinery emissions is bad economic and environmental policy.

It’s official, if symbolic: Santa Barbara has voted in favor of offshore drilling, though California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is opposed, in the NYT. The L.A. Times quotes a local official explaining why drilling is gaining momentum: “Unless you arrived here on a horse or walked or rode a bicycle, you are part of the oil industry.”

China has not only surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter, its power-sector emissions will double again in the next 12 years, reports the WaPo. Here’s an idea from the UN: If you want to curb emissions, stop subsidizing fuel, at Xinhua. The economics of curbing emissions has Aussies riled up: By some measures, doing nothing is cheaper than Australia’s big climate plan, in the Australian. Japan’s not waiting—the country will boost its climate-change budget 27% to $4 billion next year, in Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the British government looks set to backtrack on energy-sector “windfall taxes” after corporates strike back, in the Guardian.

Wind power’s big hurdle lies in the transmission network, notes the NYT. Current power grids are like surface streets, and the U.S. needs an interstate highway system. The agonizing wait for clean-energy tax credits threatens U.S. solar companies the most, notes the WSJ (sub reqd.), since foreign companies have more global presence.

Grist wonders why idiots like us don’t spend more time harping about the iffy economics of nuclear power. Luckily, there’s Prospect Magazine: “There are only two honest answers to the question of how much it costs to build a nuclear power station. These are ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve built it.’”

Finally, will Malthus have the last laugh? Jeffrey Sachs wonders if Malthusian nightmares might come true after all, at Scientific American.

Nuclear power’s been in the “China Syndrome” doghouse so long, in the U.S. at least, that sentiments like these from William Tucker at Freakonomics catch your eye:

It all seems too good to be true. People conjure up all kinds of nightmare scenarios just to compensate. Yet the reality remains: nuclear energy is the most environmentally benign discovery ever made.

Look ma, no emissions (AP)

The idea, Mr. Tucker says, is that it takes about a century for big ideas to trickle down—John Locke’s take on government only found its big audience with the American revolution, for example. Einstein’s 1905 nuclear breakthrough is finally ready for prime time, he says, now that the U.S. is desperate for new energy sources and trying to figure out how to curb emissions of greenhouse gases at the same time.

John McCain is certainly a believer. He wants to build 45 new nuclear plants in the U.S. Barack Obama’s stance is less clear.

The official Obama campaign line on nuclear power is that the jury is still out: “It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing” issues like security, waste storage, and proliferation.

Those are the same three bugbears that worried Obama adviser Jason Grumet earlier in the campaign, when he disavowed “current” nuclear technology. Since the government has spent close to $20 billion on the Yucca Mountain storage facility to no avail, and hasn’t added even friendly nuclear powers like India to the non-proliferation treaty, those seem like pretty big—and long-term—obstacles; not something that can be solved in the next presidential term. Plus, nuclear power’s not cheap.

The Democratic convention’s theme Wednesday night is “Securing America’s Future.” Will there be a place for nuclear power in that conversation?

Energy markets shuddered Tuesday as Gustav became a hurricane near Haiti and aimed for the Gulf. Crude futures shrugged off a weaker stronger dollar and surged past $117, Bloomberg reports. Oil markets didn’t react that much to recent Russian saber-rattling over the Caucasus.

Gustav’s projected path, moving northwest at 12 miles an hour, would take it smack into watery oil patch in the Gulf of Mexico. Warm water there could also make the storm, right now just a Category 1 hurricane, even stronger. Also from Bloomberg:

“This time next week it will be somewhere in the Gulf,” said Eric Wilhelm, senior meteorologist at private forecaster AccuWeather Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania. “All the states lining the Gulf Coast of the U.S. will be on the lookout.”

Now that T. Boone Pickens and even Nancy Pelosi are toying with the idea of additional offshore drilling, do summertime storms represent a real threat to America’s energy policy?

Senator Barack Obama really wants to tackle climate change, of course. That’s such a big issue, it’s running neck-and-neck with health care at the top of the Democratic economic agenda. And Senator Edward Kennedy barely mentioned climate change in his teary convention speech, unlike health care. (Our colleagues at the Health Blog tackle that issue here.)

The usual problem is that expensive, broad-reaching programs like that tend to get bogged down on the Hill. But President Obama would act on the climate with or without the help of Congress, apparently. From today’s WSJ:

The Obama camp also believes it has a regulatory stick to force congressional action. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. While the Bush administration has taken a go-slow approach, a President Obama would shift into high gear, says Elgie Holstein, a senior Obama energy adviser. If Congress didn’t act on a cap-and-trade system, he says, Mr. Obama “wouldn’t hesitate to use Clean Air Act authorization to regulate” CO2 emissions, a step that could involve a huge increase in EPA oversight of industry.

What would President Obama’s climate plan look like? He wants to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 80% by 2050, more than Republican rival John McCain and more than the recently deceased Lieberman-Warner climate bill. He also wants to sell industry the emissions permits—rather than giving away most of them for free, as Sen. McCain would—to raise upwards of $100 billion a year for other spending programs., the WSJ says.

But any climate-change bill would raise prices for energy, from gasoline to electricity, because it would put a pricetag on greenhouse-gas emissions. That’s the main reason Lieberman-Warner foundered—higher prices don’t play well in an election year. So what about Democrat concern for consumers hammered by high energy prices this year? That’s falling as quickly as oil prices:

Some other Obama energy proposals — a “windfall-profits” tax on oil companies and the tapping of the strategic petroleum reserve — may fall by the wayside, Obama aides acknowledge, if the price of oil continues to decline and energy is less of a front-page story.

Of course, in historical terms, oil and energy prices are still high. The forces that killed Lieberman-Warner aren’t likely to vanish after November. That means Sen. Obama’s tough-talk rhetoric on climate is still likely to be tempered by old-fashioned political calculations: He presumably wants a second term, after all.

Poll: If Obama becomes president, which economic policy should he push first?

NOTE: Voting’s now closed. The results are in.

Climate change regulation Overhauling health care Neither: He should focus on stabilizing the economy before moving to other issues.

Oil companies unable to use drilling leases off the coast of California have won a $1 billion ruling from U.S. courts, in the WSJ (sub reqd.), while New York and 11 other states are suing the EPA for not regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from oil refineries, setting the stage for another showdown over how the government regulates GHG emissions, also in the WSJ (sub reqd.).

Honda self-regulated since the 1970s, it seems, and is reaping the rewards as consumers flock to smaller cars, in the NYT. European carmakers are faring much worse, and warn they’ll be unable to meet stringent European emissions rules, in Deutsche Welle. Not even the venerable Vespa scooter makes the cut, in the Daily Telegraph.

With all eyes on Denver, hometown hero Gary Hart urges a post-partisan solution to the “intertwined” problems of climate change, energy policy, and national security, at Grist. Isn’t that what the Pickens Plan does? Not really, argues Yale’s Environment 360—the costs and technical obstacles are too great. (Huffington Post includes T. Boone Pickens’ new ad.) Another problem: the chicken-and-egg connundrum of switching America’s car fleet to natural gas, at the WaPo. Meanwhile, the WSJ edit page takes another swipe at House speaker Nancy Pelosi for her natural gas faux pas, and asks if ignorance of energy issues lay behind her opposition to drilling.

Energy Outlook proposes a simple solution to the “pay-go” hurdle that has stymied clean-energy tax credits: For $1 a month, ratepayers could more than pay for all of America’s clean-energy support. For 10 cents a month, Californian ratepayers can pay for more climate-change research, if not remedies, at the LAT’s Greenspace blog. And for the ethanol gluttons, R-Squared takes another crack at Coskata’s second-generation process.

The home-electronics explosion means that 15% of your power bill comes from the power strip on the floor—here are four ways to trim that bill, in the WSJ (sub reqd.). Finally, straight out of Yes, Minister, the British department responsible for drafting the country’s energy-efficiency programs gets a failing grade itself, in the Guardian.

GOP: Green Ocean Party? (AP)

First up? Saving the whales—literally. The White House Council on Environmental Quality cheered new administration rules that will, it says, better protect the “critically endangered” Northern Atlantic Right Whale, always a flash-point issue with environmentalists. The new rules include a speed limit for ships thirty miles out to sea in areas they might hit whales, and also includes new measures like “passive acoustics” to help better track the whales during migration.

Then, the White House press department released a memo from President Bush outlining further steps to preserve oceans, after his invocation this May of a 1906 law to declare huge swaths of the ocean “marine monuments.”

The memo, addressed to the secretaries of Defense, Interior, and Commerce, as well as to the Council on Environmental Quality, asks for those departments to weigh in on the “advisability” of using executive power to protect a series of islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The list at times reads like a travelogue of World War II battles, including Wake Island and the Northern Marianas. The president’s memo cites the contribution the islands and their reefs have made to biodiversity in the Pacific (not to mention diversity in Hollywood war flicks).

But just as the Democrats will discover when energy policy takes the podium this week in Denver, balancing the environment and the economy is a high-wire act. The president’s memo continues:

Because Johnston Atoll and Wake Island have supported active military bases, and the other areas in the Pacific include areas of strategic importance to the United States, any measures your assessment recommends should not limit the Department of Defense from carrying out the mission of the various branches of the military stationed or operating within the Pacific and shall be consistent with freedom of navigation and international law. Please also consider cultural, environmental, economic, and multiple use implications of any measures you recommend, including the extent to which they are compatible, if applicable, with sustaining access to: (1) recreational and commercial fishing; (2) energy and mineral resources; and (3) opportunities for scientific study.

In other words, all systems are go when it comes to protecting the environment, unless protecting that environment seems to interfere with anything else at all.