Latest Articles

Pretty much what you thought it was

Six years and a protracted legal battle later, The Washington Post has finally gotten its hands on a list of who met with Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force in 2001. Turns out it’s a bunch of oil and gas execs. Shocking. This is my favorite ‘graph from the story: The task force issued its report […]

All the kids are talking about it

Today in Greenwire, Darren Samuelsohn rightly notes that the big — and by big we’re talking multi-billions of dollars — question around a cap-and-trade system is how the credits are initially allocated. Do you give more to utilities with lots of coal plants, because they need help transitioning to a low-carbon future? Do you give […]

A scary/funny post from China

I found this in my Google Reader feed this morning, a post from a British blogger named Charlie living in Beijing. Three weeks after it was reported that the Chinese government convinced the World Bank to suppress a report that over 700,000 Chinese citizens die every year of pollution-related ailments, due to the fact that it may lead to revolution social unrest among the populace, Charlie's post reads like a bittersweet valentine to the city he's lived in for four years:

What global warming could do to national parks

The National Parks Conservation Association released a new report last week, “Unnatural Disaster” (PDF), which explores the impact of global warming on national parks, and as you’d expect, the news is pretty grim. From the intro: The gradual, accelerated warming of our planet will have disastrous consequences for America’s national parks. Glaciers in the national […]

A shock absorber for the grid to enhance efficiency, reliability, and security

In their July 16th piece on solar energy technology in The New York Times, Andrew Revkin and Matthew Wald wrote that, "With more research, the solar thermal method might allow for storing energy. Currently, all solar power is hampered by a lack of storage capability." They are certainly right. In fact, a lack of storage capacity hampers a lot of things.

While there's been a lot of talk about coupling energy storage to solar (and wind) power, there are additional reasons for addressing our lack of storage capability. In fact, storage technologies can act as a "shock absorber" for the whole grid and can help address some of the key challenges facing the industry, including efficiency, reliability, and security. Simply put, energy storage is good for the grid.

The passing of the former first lady (sorta) missed by enviros

Asher Price over at the Austin American-Statesman calls us out for not mentioning that Lady Bird Johnson passed away last week. The former First Lady (what did she go by, anyway? “Lady”? “Bird”? “LB”?) was a staunch environmentalist, even though she rejected the term. She was the major driving force in the more than 200 […]

House offset hearing on Wed.

This hearing is the main reason I haven't had time to post more "rules" -- I know, I know ... you have been waiting for them as anxiously as for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming hearing on voluntary carbon offsets tomorrow will be webcast at globalwarming.house.gov -- and I have been reliably informed that if there's any problem with that website, the direct link to the hearing room feed is here. You don't get that kind of information anywhere else on the web!

And here's a Greenwire (subs. req'd) story on the hearing:

Big changes, happening quickly

Don’t miss (occasional Grist contributor) Christina Larson’s piece on environmentalism in China, which contains this pithy sentence: To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the country’s growing environmental problems, you must first remember that they live here. The dynamic she describes is pretty fascinating. Environmental problems are getting so severe that they’re causing […]

Thanks in part to that ‘green’ fuel, corn-based ethanol

U.S. farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this spring, a 15 percent-plus jump from last year. If you lumped all that land together — not too hard to imagine, given that corn ag is highly concentrated in the Midwest — you’d have a monocropped land mass nearly equal in size to the state of […]

Dead

… killed by lawmakers in Albany.