Climate Climate & Energy
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 — […]
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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 […]
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Three Major Clean Energy Victories This Month
With so much in the news lately, you might have missed these three recent, major victories in the effort to move America beyond coal, so I wanted to share them with you: Illinois: Last week Governor Pat Quinn vetoed two bills that would have put natural gas customers on the hook for two new coal […]
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Daring scuba diver isn’t the only hero in the Japan tsunami disaster
Hideaki Akaiwa: Badass of the weekThis week I came across an extraordinary story about a man named Hideaki Akaiwa. He lives in the town of Ishinomaki, Japan, and works just outside it; he was at work when the tsunami hit. Told by emergency workers he couldn’t go back into town because it was too dangerous, […]
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Solving solar's variability with more solar
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The solution to the variability of solar power is more solar. It’s true that individual solar power plants can experience significant variation in power output, especially on days with mixed sun and clouds. “Output of multi-MW […]
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Why is no one talking about how bad the Japan nuke disaster could be?
Let’s hope the future doesn’t hold this. This is adapted from a post at TomDispatch; you can read the longer version here. “Not as bad as Chernobyl”? It might be better to describe the situation at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant as “remarkably unlike Chernobyl” in rural Ukraine, where, almost 25 years ago, a single uncontained […]
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Awesome chart puts nuclear radiation in perspective
Chart: Randall Munroe (Click to embiggen.) Hungry for some perspective on the nuclear situation? This mindblowing chart of relative radiation doses, made by XKCD‘s Randall Munroe, is basically a Total Perspective Vortex. It’s got something for everyone: Proponents of nuclear power can point to the difference between living near a nuke plant and living near […]
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Global Heating Causes Earthquakes
Number of earthquakes worldwide in 1990: 16,590—-number in 2008: 31,777 -U.S. Geological Society National Earthquake Information I have to say that when I first started hearing about this possible connection a couple of years ago, I was kind of a skeptic. Part of me reacted, “Hey, we’re already contending with head-in-the-sand people—like the […]
