Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
-
![]()
![]()
Chart of the day: the U.S. energy mix in 2035
It is important for everyone working or advocating around energy to understand how the power mix is expected to change in the next 20 years or so. To that end, I’ve pulled a chart out of the consulting firm Black & Veatch’s “Energy Market Perspective,” an analysis of U.S. energy markets that they update every […]
-
![]()
![]()
American teens smarter about climate change than adults, despite knowing less
More American teens than adults believe climate change is caused by humans, 57 percent versus 50 percent, says a new survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Yet American teens also tend to know slightly less than adults on the subject of climate science, says the same survey. Some of these numbers are […]
-
![]()
![]()
Power Shift will be biggest organizer training session in history
It was colder at Power Shift ’09.Photo: JakeCross-posted from the Wonk Room. Power Shift 2011, the biennial national summit of the youth climate movement, begins this Friday in Washington, D.C. The dirty-energy economy poses seemingly insurmountable challenges to the millenial generation: the destruction of our planet’s atmosphere, the poisoning of our political discourse, the dissolution […]
-
![]()
![]()
Alexis Madrigal chats about boom-and-bust fossil fuels and the promise of cheap electricity
This is the second in a series from my conversation with Atlantic tech channel editor Alexis Madrigal about themes and stories from his new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. You can read part one here. DR: Earlier you mentioned technological momentum. But in a lot of these episodes [from […]
-
Koch-funded scientist Richard Muller makes up story about Al Gore, Ralph Cicerone, and polar bears
Berkeley Professor Richard Muller, author of widely debunked books, has worked hard to undermine credibility in well-established science and doesn’t have a great grasp of basic climate science (see here) or energy (see “here). Now, as we’ll see, he has become such a victim of Gore Derangement Syndrome that he fabricated a story about the […]
-
Why are Obama and Salazar pushing a huge expansion of coal production?
This weekend’s question may have no good answer. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans to auction off 758 million tons of coal in Wyoming over the next few months. Then on Friday, the Bureau of Land Management explained they will be selling off another 1.6 billion tons of coal at a future date. […]
-
Stabilizing CO2 levels is tough for humanity, not stabilizing them is tougher
Climate science is the foundation of this blog, the sine qua non for all the other analyses. The reasons we must be far more ambitious in politics and policy and clean technology deployment are the increasing evidence of accelerated carbon-cycle feedbacks and the dire warnings from the scientific community about the dangers of unrestricted greenhouse […]
-
![]()
![]()
Batteries are not the future of green cars, says smartest guy in room
Elon Musk is a dizzyingly accomplished badass as well as a quirky workaholic, which makes him kind of like Nikola Tesla minus the full-contact pigeon fancying. And hey, that’s exactly what he named his electric automobile company, Tesla Motors. Musk, who has built Tesla’s entire business on the advanced, computer-controlled battery technology his engineers developed […]
-
![]()
![]()
Plug-in Prius not worth it, economically
Bengt Halvorson of Green Car Reports did the math on whether or not it’s worth it to buy the forthcoming plug-in version of the Toyota Prius, and the math is ugly: The Prius has a small battery that holds only enough charge to take the vehicle 14 miles, but that battery charges relatively quickly — […]
-
Arctic sea ice extent “tied for the lowest in the satellite record”
On March 7, 2011, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.64 million square kilometers (5.65 million square miles). The maximum extent was 1.2 million square kilometers (463,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average of 15.86 million square kilometers (6.12 million square miles), and equal (within 0.1%) to […]
