Articles by David Roberts
David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
All Articles
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How high a price on carbon is needed to make renewables competitive?
I’ve argued before that electricity cost comparisons are, in Walt Patterson’s memorable phrase, "an artifact of prior decisions otherwise concealed" — i.e., based on unstated moral, social, and economic assumptions. Most of those assumptions, for reasons of habit, custom, and occasionally pecuniary interest, are weighted toward the traditional way of doing things: a hub-and-spoke electricity […]
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Planktos update
Remember Planktos, the company that was going to sail into the Atlantic ocean and dump a bunch of iron ore, hoping it would stimulate CO2 absorption and profit the company via carbon offsets? Well, Andy Revkin brings news that the company has set sail. Guess the cat’s out of the bag! (Planktos has been criticized […]
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A call for moral boldness (and decentralized grids!)
Over at Rolling Stone‘s blog, Tim Dickinson says of this video: It just may change your opinion about John Edwards — in particular about how compelling a combination it is to be both a Southerner and an unabashed progressive. He starts his bit on global warming about halfway in. Decentralizing the energy grid gets a […]
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You can’t begin an argument about coal’s future by assuming coal’s future
I swear, I don’t mean to just rant about stupid coal articles every day. But people keep writing stupid coal articles. I’m like Pavlov’s dog at this point — they say stupid things, I bash them. Good boy! The latest is this interview in Wired’s Planet Earth blog with Jeremy Carl, who researches how to […]
