Latest Articles

Is this a green home?

I’m thinking about reporting on this house as an example of sensible environmental design reproducible for the masses. Can anyone help me decide? This is a press release (emphasis mine): We handle parenting author, environmentalist, and “The Crafty Mom” Mary Lyon who recently built her 6,700 square foot spectacular “green” home in Brentwood, California. Below […]

Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)

Lamar Alexander Sen. Lamar Alexander realizes that we need to do something about climate change and has tried to distance himself from the skeptics in his party. “I am one senator who thinks climate change is a problem, humans are causing it, and we need to deal with it,” he said at a recent hearing […]

US can easily meet 2020 emissions target while lowering the nation’s energy bill $700 billion

More than perhaps any other company, McKinsey has documented how an aggressive energy efficiency strategy sharply lowers the cost of climate action (see “McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero“). Today they released their most comprehensive analysis to date of this country’s energy efficiency opportunity, “Unlocking energy […]

The Germans’ heralded carbon capture plan? Pumping it directly into the atmosphere.

NIMBY, meet NUMBY: Not under my backyard. The Guardian reports today: It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming — a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground. But the German carbon capture plan […]

Joe Romm’s strategy to lose the clean energy race

Jesse Jenkins, left, and Teryn Norris.Breakthrough InstituteOn Monday, Joe Romm of Climate Progress publicly attacked us for publishing an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle — called “Will America lose the clean energy race?” (a longer version was posted here at Huffington Post.). In that piece, we urged Congress to fully fund President Obama’s energy […]

Learning from past civilizations

To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early 21st century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond. As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of […]

The climate science fight club

So a guy writes in to our local paper saying climate change is a big scam, nobody ever shows the actual data, blah blah blah. I usually ignore these things like I ignore the moon landing deniers and the flat earthers, but this time I had a second in the morning and so I sent him […]

The amazing promise and many challenges of passivhaus construction

I’m in decent shape for 52, but it took everything I had to carry a hefty piece of welded steel plate out of the backyard — and I didn’t place it any too gently on the curb when I got it there. So I was impressed when John from Blue Scrap & Recycling casually flipped […]

Henry Waxman’s decade-long fight to improve the Clean Air Act

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee and coauthor of the ACES bill passed by the House in June. Naturally, political observers are curious about his thoughts on the fight to pass climate/energy legislation this year, but in media interviews he tends to be careful, measured, and fairly abstract. […]

On the origin of ‘superweeds’ and the chemical treadmill

“There is no telling how many articles I have written with the theme of ‘Roundup every Monday morning until there is nothing out there but soybeans’ or ‘the best tank mix partner with Roundup is more Roundup.’ That made soybean farming so easy that even I could probably have done it.”—Ford L. Baldwin of Arkansas-based […]