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A little of this and a little of that to carry through Chrismahannukwanzika

I don’t want to head into the holidays with a browser full of unattended tabs, so forthwith, the Great Holiday Tab Dump of 2008! This gets my vote for Most Awesome Stunt of 2008. Somebody — no one knows who — walked up to Britain’s biggest and allegedly most secure coal power plant, climbed the […]

Survey: Oil and gas industry leaders say the era of cheap gas is over.

The cost of oil has been a rollercoaster ride since the 1970s. Thankfully, we’ve hit a low in this season of recession, foreclosures, and a major Wall Street meltdown. But nobody expects the ride to be over — and the only way to go now is up. Just ask oil industry insiders. A recent survey […]

Uh oh, looks like the news media is tired of getting played

“Senator, if there is a hoax, isn’t it this report of yours?” — MSNBC’s David Shuster, asking Sen. James Inhofe about his farcical list of 650 “scientists” that dispute the theory of anthropocentric climate change

Conservative Dems push back against progressive green spending

Last week the Washington Post had a story on the tension between fast stimulus and green stimulus; this week they have another along the same lines. Smart growth groups and enviros are trying to push the balance as far as possible toward green infrastructure spending: public transit and smart grid. In contrast, Rep. Baron Hill […]

Finally, Roger Pielke Jr. admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming

Roger Pielke, Jr. is usually very hard to pin down. But at least it is now plain for everyone to see that his climate policies are no different from Bjorn Lomborg’s, or George Bush’s for that matter (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”). Following Pielke’s “specific policies” would inevitably […]

Climate youth activists target the Capitol Power Plant

The U.S. coal-fired power plant fleet is filled with geezers. Out of 1,522 existing generating units, 600 were running during the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Nearly 10 percent were built in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Still, it would be hard to find a coal plant that has seen more history than the Capitol Power Plant in […]

End of year musings on coal and its competitors

Some thoughts as we get closer to a new energy policy. Our total U.S. electric grid has a peak capacity of just over 1,000 GW. (That’s 1 billion kilowatts or, if you prefer, enough to power 10 billion hundred-watt light bulbs.) Of that total, here’s what we’ve installed just since 1995: ~200 MW of solar […]

New anti-coal ads repeat mistakes

The anti-clean-coal Reality Campaign is a coalition of some very serious groups and smart people. They have the same goal that all CSAs (climate science advocates) do, namely to stop building new dirty coal plants (and presumably to start shutting down existing ones). But I just don’t think they have figured out an effective way […]

Homo mitigation

Pope: Protecting tropical rainforests from climate change is important, but not as important as protecting humanity from TEH GAY!

Coal front group sets up ‘Blogger Brigade’ to fight reality

Originally posted at the Wonk Room. The coal industry is attempting to organize bloggers to promote their false “clean coal” propaganda. The Reality Coalition, a group of national environmental organizations, have begun airing the message that “There’s no such thing as clean coal,” to counter the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by coal-powered corporations […]