Latest Articles

The incredible shrinking American

Could our neglect of health and the environment be making us shorter? According to recent studies, chaps in Holland are an average of two inches taller than American men these days, whereas in the 19th century, our lads towered an average two and a half inches over them and all of the rest of western […]

Here’s wishing you plentiful petroleum

I give you Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey of gas prices: I’m hoping that consumers will see through the rhetoric about consuming less, demanding less, as faulty. It is not a given that consuming less will be good for our economy or for our personal freedom. It is not even established for our […]

Jam Plan Is Toast

NYC mayor’s traffic-reducing proposal shot down, for now New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion-fee proposal, reportedly down to the wire on Monday, is now just down, period. The plan would have charged a fee for Manhattan-bound vehicles during peak hours, but the state Senate adjourned without voting on the measure after Democrats made it […]

Deader Than Ever

Biofuels could contribute to historically big Gulf of Mexico dead zone Still think corn-based biofuels will save the world? Here’s another piece of the no-they-won’t puzzle: Researchers say more intensive farming of more land in the Midwestern U.S. — in part a result of the push for more corn production — could contribute to the […]

Pretty Please, With Cuomo On Top

New York state sues ExxonMobil over oil spill foot-dragging A shot has been fired in the quiet oil-spill battle in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Greenpoint neighborhood: the state has sued ExxonMobil to force the cleanup of the estimated 8 million gallons of oil and petroleum byproducts still underground after a 1950 explosion. The spill, larger than the […]

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.