Articles by Gar Lipow

Nevada Solar one is a better and smaller neighbor than a coal mine

Every now and then, one hears complaints about solar energy: "But it takes too much land!" "An entire Idaho!" "Three Californias!"

Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity. Even acre for acre, I'll take Solar One's pleasant campus over a coal mine.

Math below the fold.

Militarization and progressive change are not compatible

The U.S. military push for coal-based synthetic fuels reminds us that in the long run, solving climate chaos is incompatible with an aggressive military policy. Solutions will ultimately have to draw on traditional American virtues of thrift and cleverness, not the domination and power expressed in the new U.S. Air Force motto: Air Force Above All, which probably sounded more impressive in the original German.

Militarization has a long history of pushing us down less sustainable paths in the U.S. Part of that is direct meeting of Pentagon needs. For example, one reason we have today's super-highway system is that Eisenhower was impressed by the military advantages of the German autobahn network -- both for the Germans and for the allies when their turn came to use it.

The "National Defense Highway System," as it was called when first inaugurated, was built wide enough to allow tanks and military convoys to travel freely across the U.S. without depending on rail. The financial structure was similar to the autobahn's as well. The national highways trust is based largely on fuel taxes paid by both rail and trucks, but which rail gets almost no benefit from -- that helped ensure the gradual shift of freight from trains to trucks.

Offset criticisms have not stopped being true

Patrick McCully has a great feature in The Guardian about some of the problems with offsets. (No single article can tackle all of them.)

The points are pretty standard:

1. At least two thirds of the offset are fraudulent.
2. Fraudulent offsets used as permissions to burn coal and increase climate chaos.
3. Throw in massive supporting evidence in an entertaining package.

Ho freaking hum, right?

Meanwhile, the world keeps burning. Every ton of offset-enabled coal power makes our climate a little sicker.

Carbon trading creates perverse incentives

I've said before that one problem with greenhouse-gas emissions trading (as opposed to a carbon price) is that it creates a whole new lobby with incentives to build the emissions market at the expense of actual emissions reductions.

Speaking at the Carbon Expo trade fair in Cologne, Germany, Ken Newcombe, a pioneering carbon trader who currently works for Goldman Sachs provided an example: