Latest Articles

Depressing ocean news buoyed by Pam Anderson’s striptease

Walking into the office this morning, I saw this headline in bold letters on the front of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Scientists fear ‘tipping point’ in Pacific Ocean.” Then, a news search told me this: “As vast as the oceans are, almost no waters remain untouched by human activities.” It’s enough to make me wanna strangle […]

Nearly all of world’s oceans tainted by human activity, says study

Human activity has tainted all but 3.7 percent of the world’s oceans, and 41 percent of the world’s waters have been heavily impacted, says a new study in Science. A graphic map illustrates in all-too-clear terms that the briny deep has taken a terrible toll from 17 human threats, including climate change, overfishing, fertilizer runoff, […]

Aussie musician Xavier Rudd chats about coming to America and greening his tour

Xavier Rudd. Photo: James Looker When Australian musician Xavier Rudd was 10 years old, he realized that he could reuse an old vacuum-cleaner hose as a didgeridoo. Talk about a career rooted in green values. Since then, Rudd has moved on from vacuum-cleaner hoses to guitars, harmonicas, banjos, lapsteels, and even real didgeridoos — but […]

A solar grand plan

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

-----

A recent issue of Scientific American featured a "Solar Grand Plan." Its authors described a way for the United States to obtain nearly 100 percent of its electricity and 90 percent of its total energy, including transportation, from solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal resources by end-of-century. Electricity would cost a comfortable 5 cents per kilowatt hour.

U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced 62 percent from their 2005 levels. Some 600 coal and gas-fired power plants would be displaced. The federal investment would be $400 billion over the next 40 years ($10 billion a year) to deploy renewable technologies and suitable transmission infrastructure.

If that future seems too good to be true, then look at two other studies during the past 13 months that have reached similar conclusions: one sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society (PDF), the other by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. All three concur that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can satisfy the nation's demand for power without additional nuclear or fossil-fueled power plants.

If $400 billion seems unaffordable, consider: It's less money than the federal government already has spent on the Iraq war, only a third of the $1.2 trillion that some experts now predict the war will cost, and only a sixth of the federal government's current annual subsidies for fossil and nuclear energy.

And if a Solar Grand Plan seems politically implausible, read the newspaper. Last November, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said we have until 2020 to make major changes in greenhouse-gas emissions. Two weeks ago, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell told his staff that world oil demand will outpace supply within seven years. That means rapidly rising oil prices, more recession (the last five recessions in the U.S. were preceded by high oil prices), more power for oil-producing nations like Iran and Russia, and more likelihood of international conflicts.

The more practical -- and certainly the more survivable -- of these two futures is the Solar Grand Plan, an aggressive national effort to rebuild the economy on a foundation of efficiency and sustainable energy supplies. To get to that future, national energy and climate policy must have a few key ingredients.

From Flesh to Flurry

Vegan exposure The perfect eco-nightspot: Casa Diablo. “[It’s] vixens not veal; sizzle, not steak,” says the owner. “We put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.” Photo: iStockphoto You want a piece of her? A letter to the Parents Spears: “We have heard that Britney asked for ice cream while she was in […]

Sexiest jobs lists ‘forget’ to include eco-professionals

In a crushing blow to environmental types everywhere, two "sexiest jobs" lists emerged recently and neither one picked an eco-professional among the sexy. According to CareerBuilder.com, the sexiest jobs are: Entertainer/Model Cocktail Waitress Athlete Firefighter Cowboy Nurse Artist Military Professional Construction Worker TV/Anchor Personality Salary.com selected: Firefighter Personal Trainer CEO Bartender Pilot Nurse Surgeon Photographer […]

Researchers develop energy-generating clothing

We like the idea of harvesting energy from our own movement, but wearing a knee brace just sounds too clunky. But now U.S. researchers publishing in Nature have developed a way to generate electricity from nanofibers woven into fabric. If the technology goes mainstream, we’ll be able to generate energy just by getting dressed — […]

How strong is McCain’s commitment to fighting global warming?

The following post was first published on Passing Through, The Nation‘s guest blog, where I will be posting all month. Though recession and war are probably higher on the public’s immediate priority list, there is no challenge of greater historical consequence facing the next U.S. president than the climate crisis. It is vitally important that […]

The fourth IPCC report is still going strong a year later

I was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year ago.

The reason, he thought, was that the skeptics were "in the room" with the writing team. What he meant was that the scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any "gotcha" mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement in the report bulletproof.

In fact, it is quite amazing to me that essentially none of the IPCC documents produced over the last 18 years has been found to contain any substantive errors. The trolls, of course, will come out with their litany of "errors" that the IPCC contains (I suspect a few will appear in the comments to this post), but when you look closely, the trolls are almost always misrepresenting the IPCC's statements.

In fact, that's the most common attack on the IPCC: make the claim that the IPCC said something ridiculous (which it didn't actually say), then disprove that ridiculous statement, and then use that as evidence that the IPCC's reports cannot be trusted. "The IPCC says that 2 + 2 = 5, but that's just hogwash. We know that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus, climate change is a hoax." Yeah, right.

California bill would require climate change to be taught in schools

Science textbooks approved for California public schools would have to cover climate change, and science teachers would be required to put warming in their curricula, under a bill approved by the state Senate and heading to the Assembly. Says state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who introduced the bill, “This is a phenomenon of global […]