Latest Articles

Greenie Pig on ‘shrooms: A trip into wild-food foraging

Photo: Elisabeth Kwak-HefferanFarm to table? Please, so 2009. Forest to table is where it’s at right now. And while foraging one’s own nettles, berries, or chestnuts (or paying top dollar for them at hip restaurants) has both foodies and greenies all in a tizzy these days, no other gathering activity has quite the cachet of […]

Chow-to: Clean sardines

By now it’s become conventional wisdom that eating low on the food chain is more sustainable. In the case of fish, that means sardines, anchovies, sand-dabs, and other small, short-lived fish. Despite recent news that our small forage fish need to be better managed to avoid future problems, if you’re going to eat fish at […]

Clean energy has highest return rate of any federal program

Cross-posted from Climate Progress. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2001 that a handful of clean energy technologies returned about $30 billion on a research and development (R&D) investment of about $400 million. The United States is an amazing venture capitalist when it comes to clean energy R&D. But the all-Solyndra, all-the-time stenographers of […]

Clean, cheap long distance electricity transmission? Worth investigating.

I recently stumbled upon some High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) technology that seems promising to me for long distance transmission. It is not existing technology; it is a detailed proposal with no prototype and not even a computer simulation behind it. Nonetheless it looks like a less expensive and more environmentally friendly way to move […]

CDM study defending CDM against charges of being a miserable failure is a miserable failure

My last post was a reminder that the Clean Development Mechanism(CDM) remains a miserable failure. The evidence that it does not actually contribute to solving the climate crisis included data that showed that the overwhelming majority of offsets certificates issued and approved by the program are generated by scandal ridden projects, and are widely acknowledged […]

Colorado to achieve 30% renewables 8 years early, ratepayer savings of $409 million

Advocates say that massive amounts of renewable energy are feasible and will save money in the long run. But how do we know that’s true? Because that’s exactly what’s happening.  Let’s take Colorado. The state has a 30 percent renewable energy requirement. How are things going? Xcel, the largest utility in the state, says it […]

CDM still a miserable failure

Since there seems to be resurgence of attempts to defend the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) offset system, it seems time for a reminder of how badly the idea has failed. The fundamental idea behind CDM is that greenhouse gas polluters in rich nations could continue to release greenhouse gases, but pay polluters in poor nations […]

What the Keystone XL delay means for tar sands and the green movement

The Obama administration announced late last week that the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline is going to be reassessed and possibly rerouted, delaying the final decision on its fate until after the election. The coalition that fought the pipeline — enviros, indigenous communities, Nebraska farmers, etc. — is, naturally, over the moon. (See Bill McKibben here […]

Wind electricity to be fully competitive with natural gas by 2016

Photo: Vlasta JuricekCross-posted from Climate Progress. The best wind farms in the world are already competitive with coal, gas, and nuclear plants. But over the next five years, continued performance improvements and cost reductions will bring the average onshore wind plant in line with cheap natural gas, even without a price on carbon, according to […]

Has government spending on energy research been a waste?

Cross-posted from the Council on Foreign Relations. Steve Mufson had a piece in the Washington Post Outlook section this past weekend suggesting that the $172 billion that the U.S. government has spent on early stage energy research since 1961 has largely been a waste. (I say “suggesting” rather than “arguing” because Mufson doesn’t quite make […]