Latest Articles
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Dear Nancy Sutley: Get it right on mountaintop removal
As a new round of explosives shattered the ridges across mountaintop removal mines in Boone and Raleigh counties in West Virginia yesterday, unleashed by a recent U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley gave the first indications that the Obama administration plans to act promptly on […]
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Approach water management as an economic problem
Throughout the United States, water management has been approached primarily as an engineering problem, rather than an economic one. Water supply managers are reluctant to use price increases as water conservation tools, instead relying on non-price demand management techniques, such as requirements for the adoption of specific technologies and restrictions on particular uses. In my […]
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Obama is right to return most carbon revenue to taxpayers
As a climate change policy, President Obama’s carbon cap is a winner. It gets greenhouse reductions at the lowest possible cost and spurs the innovation and invention that will drive us to a clean-energy economy. But if folks are eyeing the carbon cap as a way to raise money to pay for clean energy programs, […]
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Healthcare yes, cap-and-trade no?
George Stephanopoulos says Dems can't possibly pass both healthcare reform and cap-and-trade, and they've effectively chosen healthcare. As much as he bugs me, I fear he's pretty much right about this.
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Glenn Beck attacks smart grid as socialist plot to steal our thermostats
This post originally appeared at the Wonk Room. Glenn Beck, the conservative ideologue whose show is mocked by fellow Fox News anchors, recently attacked plans to modernize our electric grid. After Carol Browner, President Obama’s climate and energy adviser, said that a smart grid means “we can get to a system where an electric company […]
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Los Angeles rejects solar plan, still likes solar power
Los Angeles citizens voted on a citywide solar energy plan on March 3, but the very narrow results didn’t become official until yesterday: It lost (by about 1 percent). That doesn’t mean the city’s electric utility won’t proceed with rapidly expanding its solar voltaic energy portfolio — it still has the authority to do so. […]
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Eric Corey Freed extrapolates on his recommendations in the NYT
Monday I wrote “Ignore NYT’s Green Home column.” I was critical both of the author Julie Scelfo and Eric Corey Freed, the author of Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies. But having corresponded with Freed, it seems that his recommendations were taken somewhat out of context. He in fact provided a rough list of 20 […]
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First DOE loan guarantee goes to solar
Today the Department of Energy announced its first energy loan guarantee. It’s going to … Solyndra, a manufacturer of solar panels. What’s the phrase? Oh, right: elections have consequences.
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Southern Company embraces the only affordable way to ‘capture’ emissions at a coal plant today
The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO2 emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass (see here). Today, Energy Daily ($ub. req’d) reports on the huge — but little covered — news from one of the nation’s biggest carbon […]
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From Wings to Wrappers
On a wing and a prayer It’s a car … it’s a plane … it’s the Terrafugia Transition. Part car and part airplane, this hybrid combines the best of two pollutey products into one scary contraption. We’re sure it’ll take off! (Click below to see the next item in this week’s Grist List — or […]
