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Obama's Job: Protect Us from Pollution [video]

While Obama’s jobs speech is being framed as a turning point for his tenure as President, there is another job I would respectively suggest he concentrate on: his own. Here’s a quick video ad that I think gets right to point: Late last week the President blocked reforms to the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to […]

This Roller Coaster Never Stops

Waking up every morning thinking about how to move us beyond coal always comes with its share of highs and lows. But last week was an exceptionally wild roller coaster, and it left my brain spinning Last week started with an adrenaline rush as the City of Alexandria, Virginia and GenOn Energy announced plans to […]

The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Renewable Power

A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 3 of 5. Click for Part 1 or Part 2. The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Generation While technology has helped change the economics of electricity production (in favor of renewables and distributed generation), this new dynamic can as easily be controlled […]

Obama secretly saves world while environmentalists protest

While Bill McKibben and Daryl Hannah were getting hauled away in handcuffs in protest of the Obama administration’s decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, that same administration was quietly fixing the problem.  I don’t have an informed opinion about the pipeline, except that it’s clearly a symptom of our addiction to fossil energy and […]

The Tar Sands Action (smile)

  My mind has been a jumble the last couple of days as I’ve tried to think about what I would be saying in this column. I knew I would be writing about the historic and amazing Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C.   I am literally smiling as I embark on this writing journey. […]

Ozone madness

On Friday, President Obama announced that he had asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to withdraw the final National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone pollution, which she and her expert agency had sent to the White House for review. The president's announcement is terribly bad news, and terribly bad policy, on several scores.

Friday music blogging: Adam Hurst and an elegy for hope 'n' change

Today's news of Obama's unforced, unnecessary, unforgivable capitulation on public health has me down in the dumps -- so here's a sad song.

Corporate Polluters Need Not Worry, Obama's Doing their Dirty Work

Corporate polluters don't have to worry about dismantling the<a href=”http://www.epa.gov/air/caa/”> <em>Clean Air Act</em>,</a> it appears that President Obama is doing it for them. <p>As Americans prepare for the holiday weekend, President Obama has announced that he doesn&rsquo;t plan on enforcing a law that would have prevented 12,000 deaths every year by protecting Americans from ozone […]

The Economics of Distributed Renewable Power

A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 2 of 5. Click for Part 1. The Economics of Distributed Generation The falling cost of distributed renewable generation has been one of the key drivers of the transformation of the U.S. electric grid. The following chart illustrates the cost of power generation […]

Breaking: Major victory — deal reached to retire old, dirty Potomac River Coal Plant

Only a few short weeks ago, I stood on a boat in front of the ancient, dirty, and deadly GenOn coal plant in Alexandria, Virginia, and introduced Michael R. Bloomberg, philanthropist and Mayor of New York City, who then announced a game-changing gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. Today, major […]