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Why conservatives hate green jobs

This post will debunk “7 Myths About Green Jobs” and the longer version, Green Jobs Myths [PDF]. The internal inconsistencies and general illogic of these articles are staggering: Progressives will be quoting from them in defense of our positions for years to come (see debunking of Myth 6). These two articles survey and critique the […]

Drinking water: Toilet to tap — get used to it!

In the future, your drinking water is going to be recycled from your toilet — believe it. As the population grows and global warming drives desertification and the loss of the inland glaciers (see here), fresh water will become increasingly in short supply. As the AFP reported recently: Surging population growth, climate change, reckless irrigation […]

Hit the switch for Earth Hour this Saturday

CFLs everywhere will go dark Saturday night for the global Earth Hour event scheduled for 8:30 p.m. local time (wherever your locality happens to be). The aim of the annual effort — brought to us by the folks who invented Outback Steakhouse — is to make a “statement of concern about climate change,” rather than, […]

Reinventing the trailer park

Trailer parks get a bad rap, especially in the post-Katrina days when we’ve come to see them as North American refugee camps slowly poisoning their displaced inhabitants with formaldehyde fumes. But the trailer park, done right, actually holds great potential as a development model. MiniHome: a big idea. Sustain Even in its current form, with […]

The latest deceptive ad from the ‘clean’ coal front

The latest ad from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Note that they don’t even bother mentioning the “clean” part until the logo at the very end.

VRB Power accquired by Chinese Prudent Energy

Back in early January, I mentioned it was bad news that VRB, the makers of large-scale, long-lasting vanadium flow batteries for storing electricity, was going out of business. Well their assets have been acquired by Prudent Energy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chinese JD Holdings Inc. This is good news in the sense the Prudent […]

The battle for control of Eurasia will shape the new world order

This is a guest post by Pepe Escobar, the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama does Globalistan. He may be reached at pepeasia AT yahoo.com. This post was originally published at TomDispatch, and it is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. […]

Reducing emissions isn’t an economy killer

I am a little boggled by this comment in the New Yorker, by David Owen. It’s written from the perspective of someone who seems to be bothered by the threat of climate change, but who repeatedly makes the exact argument embraced by power and oil companies everywhere — slow climate change if you will, but […]

Cap-and-rebate is more robust in the face of carbon high prices

The other day, I used the fanciful example of $50,000-utility bills to illustrate how cap-and-rebate schemes can inspire energy efficiency and conservation. The numbers were deliberately exaggerated, but they highlight one of the features of cap-and-rebate that I like: the robustness of the system in the face of higher carbon prices. The political battle over […]

WRI’s Pershing named deputy climate negotiator for Clinton

Dr. Jonathan Pershing became the new Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week. Pershing will work under U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, appointed by Clinton in January as Obama’s lead climate negotiator (see Secretary Clinton appoints special climate envoy Todd Stern warning, “the urgency of […]