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A New Obsession
“This obsession with a legally binding treaty [to tackle climate change] is an obstacle for countries achieving targets they have committed to,” declared Paul Bledsoe, a climate change advisor to President Clinton. “What we need is national will to reach stated goals.” Given that the only international agreement so far, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in […]
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End of year existential rant and giving ideas: For humans
“In a place without people, be a person.” -old saying, source unknown to me. I am a parent and a 41-year-old human denizen of planet earth, climate warrior, dormant mountaineer. So like others of my ilk, I spend a lot of time in mid-life/existential crisis. That state of mind is ameliorated to some extent by […]
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Is one of the top U.S. mercury polluters in your backyard?
I just came back from a trip to Illinois, where the state had the good sense to put mercury protections in place for coal-fired power plants back in 2006. Unfortunately, here in West Virginia and in most other states, there are no mercury protections in place whatsoever, because the coal lobby has spent the last […]
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The News Smashup: 4 examples of a news app sub-genre
After attending one of Twitter’s developer teatimes here in Seattle and having various other Twitter API related experiences recently (more on that soon), it’s becoming a bit obvious that there’s a rapidly-emerging subspecies of news app coming into being. This sort of app can trace its origins pretty directly to pre-Twitter sites like Techmeme and […]
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Curbing Power Plant Carbon Pollution
This item cross-posted from NRDC’s Switchboard. Willie Sutton is famously supposed to have said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is (apparently this quote is apocryphal but it’s just too good to not keep using it). I have focused a number of recent posts on power plants because that’s where the carbon […]
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Movement-building and 2012
“But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that’s coming up. I’ve seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the “better guy,” in […]
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Friday music blogging: Milo Greene
I give you the Next Big Thing: a band called Milo Greene. They haven’t even released an album yet — they’ve got a single out and an EP coming soon — but they’re getting buzz all over the place, for good reason. They land squarely in the current indie sweet spot, with the gorgeous four-part […]
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America and Germany Getting Their Clean Energy Just Desserts
Germany is the unquestioned world leader in renewable energy. By mid-2011, the European nation generated over 20 percent of its electricity from wind and solar power alone, and had created over 400,000 jobs in the industry. The sweet German success is no accident, however, and the following pie chart illustrates the results of a carefully […]
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Why Miracle on 34th Street delights my cold cynical heart
Miracle on 34th Street is the perfect Christmas movie for those who hate fake sentimentality. It is not that the classic 1947 film lacks schmaltz, but that a sly script hides a sharp edge under every schmear. Most of the plot advances come when characters, good and bad act out of self-interest. Two exceptions are […]
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Now's not the time to hide from cleantech's challenges
In October, Third Way raised alarms that a decline in early stage venture capital investment in clean energy technologies threatened America’s ability to compete in the $2.3 trillion global clean energy market. Some in the clean energy community dismissed this warning, citing the massive growth of wind and solar capacity in the United States over […]
