Latest Articles
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Oscar smiles upon ‘Food, Inc.,’ stiffs ‘Mr. Fox’
Food, Inc., Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting exposé of the food industry, has snagged a Academy Award nomination in the “best documentary” category. (Full list of nominess here; Food Inc. is up against another food politics-themed film, The Cove.) This is a significant development. I know people in the food world who have taken a blase approach […]
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Obama talks about ‘clean coal’ and solar during YouTube Q&A
During Monday’s YouTube Q&A session, President Obama was asked why he supports “clean coal” and nuclear power at the expense of cleaner forms of energy. A group of young activists from the Energy Action Coalition posed this question: “President Obama, record numbers of young people elected you in support of a clean energy future. If […]
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Bill Gates thinks about energy innovation
Bill Gates has written on his blog that we need “innovation, not just insulation” in order to reduce CO2 to manageable levels. His motivation is robust, but his thinking is … far from clear. Because he’s Bill Gates, this is sure to attract attention, but even if he weren’t, this is worth talking about. It […]
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Large-scale distributed energy is here: Recurrent Energy signs 50MW power purchase agreement
This morning, Recurrent Energy will announce that it has signed a power purchase agreement with Southern California Edison (SCE) for 50MW of solar. This might not seem like a big deal — California utilities seem to sign solar agreements every week these days — but there’s something special about this one. Recurrent’s power will not […]
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What's the equivalent of 'slow food' and 'slow money' for democracy?
For years, environmentalists have been onto something with slow food and, more recently, patient capital. Each of these ideas has succeeded because they work at several levels.
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Digging into Obama’s 2011 budget on energy and the environment
The Obama administration released its 2011 budget proposal today and the internets are choked with stories about it. The four biggest green stories are EPA funding, fossil-fuel defunding, nuke and clean energy spending, and the cap-and-trade placeholder. EPA regs are funded The EPA’s budget (PDF), which jumped up by 34 percent least year, will decline […]
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Obama’s budget proposal serves up thin gruel for school lunch reform
Twenty of these won’t even get you an apple a day to keep the doctor away. As most readers of the Grist food section know by now, school lunches draw a meager share of the national budget. The federal government reimburses school cafeterias at a rate of up to $2.68 per student per day–a level […]
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Turning the Copenhagen Accord into action on global warming
In December 2009, more than 120 Heads of Government attended the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, the largest meeting of world leaders in history (the previous largest one was the funeral of the Pope according to Wikipedia). Many of the leaders came to Copenhagen with new commitments to actions on global warming pollution (as I discussed […]
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Why senators don’t see the clean energy boom
You might not have heard, because almost nobody reported it, but new clean-energy projects attracted more global funding in 2008 than fossil-fuel projects did. For the first time ever, investors put more money in solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower than in fuels that must be burned, according to a U.N. report. And when venture-capital funding […]
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The Nation’s idea for a Clean Power Agency
Lisa Margonelli’s got a great piece in The Nation on the potential for “Gray Power.” The article makes the case for the Midwest to invest in waste heat recovery and other areas near and dear to my self-interested heart. She also puts out a pretty clever idea for a “Clean Power Authority.” She describes it […]
