Uncategorized
All Stories
-
Discovery of Fukushima contamination in areas identified by Greenpeace
TEPCO, the owners of the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, just announced that they found contamination levels 100 to 1,000 times higher than normal in sediment from the Fukushima coast. TEPCO did the sediment testing late last week — in areas Greenpeace identified for testing in our research plan — after we were […]
-
Ontario's 'buy local' energy program growing rapidly
In January, we released a report – Maximizing Jobs From Clean Energy: Ontario’s ‘Buy Local’ Policy – highlighting the impressive job forecast (43,000 jobs) from Ontario’s CLEAN Contract (a.k.a. feed-in tariff) program. News from the province suggests that the program is overcoming hurdles and continuing to grow. Forecasts for 2011 indicate that Ontario could become […]
-
Grist Hackathon Hangover Report
We just completed our first news hackathon afternoon. The purpose of the event was to give everyone at Grist the opportunity to try out new tools and ways of working together. The specific challenge of the day: given 4 hours, tell a relevant story with data. That’s it! No more guidance was given (well OK […]
-
Leaf or MiEV?
According to <a href=”http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/reservation/index”>this website</a>, Nissan is about to start taking reservations again. <blockquote>Beginning May 1, Nissan will reopen reservations to selected US customers who were registered before April 20, 2011 in states currently selling the Nissan LEAF™ (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington). Following this early-reservation period, reservations then will open to […]
-
![]()
![]()
China may have bankrupted itself building high-speed rail
We're all about high-speed rail, but not if it's going to bankrupt the world's second largest economy. Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and a longtime critic of high-speed rail, said he worries that the cost of [the country's high speed rail] project might have created a hidden debt bomb that threatens China’s […]
-
Solar PV gets grid parity for 78 million Americans with 'balance of system' best practices
Cutting non-module solar photovoltaic (PV) costs with best design practices could make solar PV cost less than grid electricity for more than 25 percent of Americans. Half of the installed cost of a solar PV array is the solar module, but the other half (the “balance of system”) involves labor, assembly, and other components. With […]
-
Obama Has His First Opponent To Campaign Against: Extremism
In 2008, Americans were fed up. Wars, a terrible economy, dishonesty, a drift from our core beliefs. That November, Barack Obama said, “Change,” which may basically have meant, “Not that.” Not that direction for America. Not that economic policy. And it worked. America didn’t want that. America wanted something different. Now, reasonable people can debate […]
-
Earth Day Aftermath – – Hope or Despair?
On Earth Day last week, I saw a burger wrapper tossed from an old Buick and was stunned that anyone still thought it was OK to use our shared city habitat as a personal dumpster. Later that same day however, I saw a homeless man pick up a Styrofoam cup from the gutter and drop […]
-
A ton of carbon, an imported widget, and thou
It’s been a long time coming, but a team led by Glen Peters, of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, has finally published a comprehensive “consumption-side” analysis of global greenhouse-gas emission, one that takes international trade fully into account. Estimates of “outsourced emissions” or “embodied carbon” have been knocking around […]
-
Court strikes down federal overreach on transmission lines
With the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress gave broad powers to the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to identify “congested” transmission corridors. The goal was to prioritize new high-voltage transmission development and to provide higher financial returns to transmission development companies. The decision created a lot of controversy, […]
