Oil companies love to say that their ownership is the average American retiree, and utilities can often claim the same. Look at your retirement account or, should you be so lucky as to have one, your company’s pension plan. Odds are that it is heavily invested in the US energy sector. Shifts in the parameters… Keep reading →
An increasing number of businesses want to be seen as green; go figure. The demand for renewable energy is predominantly driven by mandatory targets such as renewable portfolio standards (RPS) in the US, lucrative feed-in-tariffs (FITs) in Europe, or other requirements such as renewable fuel obligations in the UK. Subsidies such as production tax credits (PTCs) are among… Keep reading →
Tax code reform is expected to be high on the US political agenda this year and the issue of tax breaks or subsidies for Big Oil is often tossed around as part of the discussion. However, despite receiving various tax incentives, oil companies pay more in taxes than many other US-based multinational firms.
In their dogged pursuit of sensational headlines, media companies love to make a big deal about the largest US company by market capitalization, a title that ExxonMobil and Apple have traded for the past few years. Exxon recently reported its fourth quarter and full-year 2012 financials and on net income of roughly $45 billion last year, which is slightly higher than Apple’s approximately $42 billion, the oil company paid about twice as much in income taxes. Keep reading →
Tough week for Apple on the green front. It ran into a buzz saw of ridicule for its decision to withdraw from the EPEAT product registry, and now Greenpeace is saying the company’s ballyhooed ultra-green North Carolina data center amounts to “mostly talk and not enough walk.”
Greenpeace on Thursday did boost Apple’s “How Green Is Your Cloud?” score, moving it to 22.6 percent from the 15.3 percent the company received in April. That puts Apple well ahead of Amazon (13.5 percent) but a long way behind Dell (56.3 percent), Google (39.4 percent) and Facebook (36.4 percent), among others. Keep reading →
Could data centers someday stand alongside drilling rigs in the Marcellus Shale gas fields? It is an increasing possibility, says an energy expert at an international buildings efficiency firm.
Data centers are sometimes built for the exclusive use of such giants as Google and Facebook, but most of them are intended for hosting companies, which process data for multiple tenants. Keep reading →
Jared Anderson
Conway Irwin
Peter Gardett