Latest Articles

Security firm spied on green groups, documents show

It wasn’t all in your imagination: Private security company Beckett Brown International spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other big environmental organizations in the late 1990s through at least 2000, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones. To produce intelligence reports for PR firms and corporations involved in environmental kerfuffles with green groups, […]

Biodegrading is cool … right?

An often-great blog, "The Reality Based Community," raises an important issue: when is it better if things don't biodegrade?

Concentrated solar power is already doing great; no breakthroughs needed

Almost certainly not and absolutely not. I give two answers here because there are two very different types of solar energy:

1. Solar photovoltaics, PV, which is direct conversion of sunlight to electricity. It is well known, high-tech, uneconomically expensive in most parts of this country (but poised to resume dropping sharply in price), and intermittent (power only when the sun shines).
   
2. Solar thermal electric or concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus sunlight to heat a fluid to run a turbine or engine to make electricity. It is, as I've blogged, "The solar power you don't hear about." It is relatively low-tech, competitive today (and poised to drop sharply in price), and can be made load-following (matching the demand curve during the day and evening) and possibly baseload (round-the-clock).

Absent major subsidies, solar PV is simply not a big-time winner (in terms of kWh delivered cost-effectively) in rich countries with built-out electric grids in the near term. It is, however, a big winner in the medium-term (post-2020). I don't agree with the Scientific American article that calls for a massive $400 billion 40-year plan for solar. I have been meaning to blog that it has many weaknesses, in my mind. No energy efficiency. No wind. Heck, nothing but PV and CSP, and it looks to be mostly PV, which needs expensive storage.

Enviros not fond of new forest management rules

The U.S. Forest Service has released new regulations for forest management that are remarkably similar to regulations that a federal judge struck down last year. Under the new rules, species’ sustainability will not be evaluated individually; instead, the focus will be on overall habitat. A coalition of green groups have sued, saying the rules loosen […]

Read this interview

I hope everyone will read Lisa’s interview with Lyndon Rive of SolarCity. These innovations in financing renewables are one of the great unheralded stories of the clean energy world. I have huge hopes for them.

Gandhi, King, and climate change

The need to reduce our impacts is actually a tremendous opportunity to build a green economy, green jobs, and green infrastructure. But first it will require us -- the developed world, emerging economies, oil and coal interests -- to change the way we think. Gandhi and King understood this. In fact, they eerily anticipated our predicament and speak to us across the decades about it. They both quite clearly foresaw a time when technological development divorced from development of consciousness would threaten the survival of the planet.

State Farm pulls bike-bashing ad

Remember that stupid ad from State Farm, where the natty professional laments that gas prices have gotten so high he’s been forced — gasp — to ride a bike to work? Oh, the humiliation. Well, apparently the hubbub about the ad got so heated that it made its way back to State Farm. In response, […]

Why plowing up Conservation Reserve Program land won’t solve the food crisis

Uh oh. The New York Times reports that “thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate.” Rather then let the ground lie fallow, they’re planting it with corn, soy, and wheat — the price of each of which stands near or above all-time […]

Salmon fishing season canceled in California, heavily restricted elsewhere

Photo: Josh Larios For the first time ever, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council has voted to cancel the salmon fishing season off the coast of California and much of Oregon due to exceedingly low populations of chinook salmon in the Sacramento River area. The restrictions apply to commercial as well as recreational fishers; only a […]

Early-spring images from the headwaters of the Mississippi River

The phrase “Mississippi River” conjures a swirl of images in our collective imagination: wide, turbulent, muddy waters; chugging steamships and heavily laden barges; violent, life-altering floods; maybe even Mark Twain chomping on a pipe. Everything outsized, legendary. But at the headwaters of the river, in a quiet corner of northern Minnesota, the scene is a […]