Climate Climate & Energy
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Glacier gumshoe seeks secrets of climate change in ice
It takes a certain kind of person to gather ice cores from remote glaciers, cart them back to a lab, and unlock the clues they contain about the climate record. Such a person needs to be hardy and skilled enough in the field to lead expeditions loaded with equipment into some of the world’s most […]
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Should we prefer investing in renewable energy to cleaning up the dirty stuff?
A couple weeks ago, Michael Levi at the Council for Foreign Relations (one of the best energy analysts out there; bookmark his blog) wrote a post called “In Defense of CCS.” (For non-nerds: CCS is carbon capture and sequestration.) I’ve done plenty of bashing of CCS, so I read it with interest. It is structured […]
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Off Shore or Off Oil? (Video)
Just days before the BP Deepwater oil spill, American Petroleum Institute’s Rayola Dougher described the risk, as she new it, of offshore drilling: “Even if you have a rig that breaks loose, even if you have a catastrophic event, the most that can spill is what’s in that pipe.” What does a catastrophic event look […]
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Parking lots to parks: Designing livable cities
Can you spot the public transportation in Tel Aviv’s car-centric city?Photo: david55king via FlickrAs I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center in 1998, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. It was obvious that Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement […]
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The National Academies study, from a global point of view
A few days ago, I got mail from a colleague at Climate Action Network International, a communications guy, asking for a comment on the US National Academy of Science’s recent climate reports, or rather on the US emissions budget that is recommended / affirmed in these reports. It turned out to be quite an interesting […]
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Saudi oil cheaper than American oil
To offshore drilling advocates, the oil-soaked birds washing up on the Gulf shore are a regrettable sacrifice in our pursuit of a higher calling: energy independence. Oil is a nasty business, they admit, but to them, offshore drilling is better than continuing to buy our oil from hostile countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. […]
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The Gulf spill video roundup
So, the Gulf oil spill has been going on for more than a month now. The open wellhead is spewing thousands of gallons of oil every day, and in that classic the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease way, BP has been dispersing the rogue oil with highly toxic chemicals. Eleven rig workers are already dead. Now the lives of hundreds […]
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Tea Party helps pass carbon tax
Maryland’s Montgomery County Council passed the nation’s first county-level carbon tax on Wednesday thanks in part to a little heckling from a group of rowdy Tea Party protesters. It would be hard to dream up a more delightful twist to cap off a campaign that was about as dramatic as they come in the world […]
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Love, in the Time of Blasting
This is the scene, when the coal-fired electricity that lights up New York City’s neon theatre district lowers on stage: We are inside the home of Marie and Hovie, a young couple living in the mountain holler of Eagle Creek. With their family’s 150-year-old homestead threatened by a planned mountaintop removal strip-mining operation, Hovie, a […]
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Remembering my last oil spill
It’s been three years since a container ship, the COSCO Busan, spilled 53,500 gallons of bunker fuel into San Francisco Bay, just after my return home to live on the bay by the sea that I love. Remnant oil still sometimes surfaces after it rains and the bay’s herring fishery has yet to recover. Ten […]
