Latest Articles

New Study Finds $123 Billion in Savings From New Appliance Standards

The Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP) and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) released a new report highlighting the opportunities for saving billions of dollars and huge amounts of energy through updated federal appliance standards. The full report can be found here, executive summary here, and a press release is here. Add […]

JoBros, Miley Cyrus send on eco-message, and more

Photo: Mark O’DonaldWake up, America!Miley Cyrus, the JoBros, and other Disney mouseketeers tweensters want you to “send it on” — your love for the earth, that is. However, when it comes to this sugar-pop single, we suggest you only send it on to your worst enemies.                   […]

Solar is getting cheap

Much of the rhetoric against energy legislation of any kind—and at any level—centers on cost.  So advocates spend a lot of time explaining why continuing with the status quo is not a low cost option: clean(er) coal is not cheap, and nukes are really expensive.  To say nothing of terraforming Mars. The other half of […]

A debate about soil, organics, and nutrition

Inert medium for turning agrichemichals into food, or a teeming, diverse ecosystem? “The whole problem of health–in soil, plant, animal, and man–is one great subject.” — Albert Howard, The Soil and Health Ezra Klein and I are engaged in a little debate over the value of organic food. I’m honestly a little surprised to be […]

Lower your expectations for Copenhagen, says Foreign Affairs journal

Michael A. Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the September/October Foreign Affairs, finds “vanishingly small” odds that December’s international negotiations in Copenhagen will produce a comprehensive climate treaty. From the journal’s summary (emphasis mine): “Government officials and activists should fundamentally rethink their strategy and expectations” for the December climate conference in Copenhagen, […]

NASA: Second hottest July on record

Fast on the heels of the second hottest June on record, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that July is also the second hottest on record. NASA just quietly updates its data set (here).  NASS GISS is much more low-key than NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which issues a major report on the climate […]

The Climate Post: Grid, for lack of a better word, is good

First Things First: Cars, trucks, planes, and other things that go add more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere than any other sector where end-users burn their own fuel. And transportation added more energy-and-climate headlines this week than any other sector, driven by an emergency congressional payout to continue the “cash-for-clunkers” program and General Motors’ promotional […]

North American feed-in tariff policies take off

Gainesville’s feed-in tariff program is limited to 4 megawatts of solar PV each year. The program is already fully subscribed through 2015 — a 24-megawatt commitment.Photo courtesy U.S. NRELClean energy advocates in Europe have long considered the feed-in tariff as an antidote to the industrial world’s fossil fuel dependency. Now, the United States and Canada […]

Climate-news poem: Tween-pop edition

Show them all the Jonas they possess inside. It’s easy to smirk at Selena and MileyThey don’t seem to work, and they’re far too smiley.And when they record a new eco-song,Who can afford to listen for long? But here is the thing us fogeys must know:When tween angels sing, even if the songs blow, The […]

Economist Greg Mankiw’s bottom line on climate policy: Government can’t do anything right

Gregory MankiwThe New York Times turned over some of its valuable opinion space to Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw last weekend, so that he could discuss the merits of various carbon policies. His record on that score is not great, and he doesn’t have any special training or experience on the subject, but as far […]