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Death of ‘lightbulb ban’ greatly exaggerated

Congresscritters who love inefficiency, waste, and air pollution — or at least the money that comes from industries that do — attached a rider to the spending bill yesterday evening that will reverse an earlier law to phase out crappy old-style lightbulbs. The crazy thing is that the ban is still in effect, and the […]

New approach to climate deniers: Launch them into space!

Sir Richard Branson in his WhiteKnightTwo aircraft.Photo: Dave Malkoff This story has been corrected and updated since its original publication. See below for details. Here’s a new idea for how to deal with climate deniers: Blast them into space. The proposal came yesterday during a freewheeling panel discussion among California Gov. Jerry Brown, Virgin Group […]

America must not back down on sustainable energy

Clockwise from top left: Sens. John Kerry, Sheldon Whitehouse, Barbara Boxer, and Bernie Sanders.If you read just the headlines these days, you might think renewable energy in America is going the way of Solyndra. Don’t take our word for it: A recent headline from Fox News declared “ENTIRE Solar Industry on Brink of Collapse.” We […]

‘Brutal logic’ and climate communications

In a couple of posts last week — here and here — I laid out the brutal logic implied by the latest climate science (with credit to scientist Kevin Anderson for stripping away the rosy assumptions hiding in many of today’s common climate scenarios). To sum up: a rise in temperature of 2 degrees C […]

Bloomberg: Mayors hold key to climate change progress

“As mayors — the great pragmatists of the world’s stage and directly responsible for the well-being of the majority of the world’s people — we don’t have the luxury of simply talking about change but not delivering it.” That was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking at the United Nations yesterday. Bloomberg delivered the remarks […]

Fundamental breakthrough could double electricity from solar panels

It is a truth often repeated that fundamental physical limits mean solar panels can never capture and transform more than about 31 percent of the sun's energy. But Xiaoyang Zhu at the University of Texas apparently just did the impossible, and in a most spectacular fashion: He found a way to increase the efficiency of […]

The return of the Keystone XL pipeline

Keystone XL is back from the dead. After President Obama announced a delay in a final decision on the tar-sands pipeline, House Republicans’ first gambit was to try to speed up that process. But now, they have a more sinister plan: They are trying to force through wholesale approval of the pipeline project. They're doing […]

Critical List: Congress does everything it can to screw the environment; fabric cleaned by sunlight

Congress voted to put sanctions on Iran, which would make it harder for Iran to sell oil, but potentially make oil sales more profitable for the regime overall. After all the work that the anti-Keystone coalition did, Republicans are trying to tack a measure to approve the pipeline onto a bill that extends the payroll […]

A dollar badly spent: New facts on processed food in school lunches

Photo: USDA I want to draw attention to an eye-opening investigative report on school lunch that has gotten a bit lost in the holiday shuffle. In a collaboration between The New York Times and the Investigative Fund, reporter Lucy Komisar delved into the billion-dollar business of the national school lunch program and found some unsettling news. […]

Dirty South: Youth farms keep New Orleans teens in school gardens

The effort solves an important riddle: how to keep students engaged with food after eighth grade.