Latest Articles

Solar’s bright ideas for the green stimulus package

Carrying on one of the most annoying campaign memes (and boy is that bar high) into current policy discussions, the New York Times published an article that begins with the line: Move over Joe the Plumber. Spencer the Solar Installer is here. Every group under the sun has ideas for how their issue could be […]

Cellulosic ethanol’s bumpy ride

The so-called Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 lays out ambitious targets for production of cellulosic ethanol: a gradual increase to 16 billion gallons per year by 2022. Rounding off to the nearest 10 million, producers are churning out approximately zero gallons of the stuff today. That had better change quickly. By 2010, the […]

Obama announces Solis for Labor and LaHood for Transportation

Barack Obama announced four new members of his team in a press conference Friday afternoon, including Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) for secretary of transportation and Rep. Hilda Solis for secretary of labor. Solis, Obama said, would be a leader in creating green-collar jobs. “We’re also going to have to train our workers to be prepared […]

Where will the money for public investment come from?

As I said the other day, I’m going to be asking a few questions about cap-and-dividend. Today’s question is about public investment. As people around here have heard a million times by now, climate policy is a three-legged stool: carbon pricing, public investment, and regulation/regulatory reform. All of these will be necessary given the size […]

Study finds that tolls and parking charges are key to ease traffic

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster. They considered lots of the standard solutions — improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth — and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. […]

A look at EPA administrators since the agency’s founding

As government titles go, “administrator” doesn’t have the same ring as “secretary,” “czar,” or “ambassador.” But it’s an accurate moniker for the top job at the Environmental Protection Agency, where the president’s appointee is charged with running an agency of 17,000 employees organized around 10 regional offices, with an overall annual budget of more than […]

Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003, rate of Greenland summer ice-loss triples 2007 record

The AP reports on new data to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union: More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming. More than […]

Semiletov tells AGU that, if released, 1 percent of ESAS methane could cause runaway warming

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a Russian scientist who has spent the last 15 years tracking the release of methane from Siberia was asked if a huge surge he and his team detected this summer constituted “a global emergency.” Igor Semiletov did not say no, and did […]

Bush pledges $17.4 billion for auto bailout, with no efficiency requirements

President Bush today approved $13.4 billion in emergency loans for General Motors and Chrysler, and will make another $4 billion in loans available in February. The loans are intended to keep the automakers alive until March 31, at which point the Obama administration will get to decide how to proceed. In a press conference this […]

The incoming energy secretary sees corn as a ‘transitional’ fuel crop

In his interview yesterday morning on NPR on prospective USDA chief Tom Vilsack, Michael Pollan touches on the former Iowa governor’s virulent support for ethanol (which fits well with the etha-mania of the former Illinois senator who nominated him). Pollan expresses hope that that Vilsack will steer U.S. policy away from corn-based ethanol, which most […]