Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Pledge to End Mountaintop Removal in 2010
From Nell Greenberg. I have spent the last two years working to end the devastating, unjust practice of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). This is a practice that requires dynamiting the tops off of ancient Appalachian Mountains and contaminating families’ drinking water for a tiny tiny amount of our nation’s coal. I don’t live in […]
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Popular thoughts about climate change
Weather you’re a conservative, an American, or everyone else, we fear you may feel like just another statistic in this wryly scientific graph. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of pun-usual green news just like this, sent out every Friday.
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How Energy Efficient is a Doublewide? (Not very)
Have you ever stopped to think about the energy efficiency of a doublewide? DOE is about to do just that, having initiated a rulemaking to develop mandatory standards for manufactured homes (basically a building code) under order from Congress to finish by 2011. I just drafted and submitted NRDC’s comments to the docket. Most people […]
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How the West is Winning Against Coal
There is so much good news coming out of the western U.S. these days on coal and clean energy. First up – another domino fell for the Blackstone Group. Blackstone had been funding the construction of three new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. (I’ve written about them before). Last month the River Hill plant […]
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LA Turns Lights on Deadly Coal, Bright Clean Energy Future
As I drive down the crowded LA freeway this evening, I will consider these facts: According to a fairly recent study, California’s costly dependence on faraway coal-fired plants in Arizona and Utah results in an estimated 67 million tons of global-warming carbon–“the global warming pollution emanating from these smokestacks is equivalent to the emissions […]
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Halting tropical deforestation is in the U.S. interest
Click to enlarge. “Want to Protect Farms and Ranches Here? Protect them there. Ending deforestation in the tropics isn’t just some tree-hugger’s cause.” Those are the opening lines of a new advertisement campaign run by the Ohio Corn Growers Association and Avoided Deforestation Partners which stresses the need to protect tropical forests in order to […]
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Without major capital investments, this generation of Americans will short change the next
From 1980 to 2007, total U.S. electricity consumption increased by a factor of 1.8, but total generation capacity increased by only 1.7 times. In other words, demand out-grew supply. For a while, that was fine — we had more toys than we needed, and real power prices declined for two decades as we made better […]
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Without affordable clean alternatives, South Africa turns to coal
South Africa’s finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, has an op ed in the Washington Post that illustrates the multi-faceted challenges facing developing nations as they struggle to provide the affordable access to modern energy needed to pull citizens out of poverty. The piece highlights the current tension between such objectives and simultaneous concerns about the environmental […]
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Tapping the power of energy efficiency
One of the fastest-growing states in the nation has the potential to save its residents billions of dollars over the next decade and a half and create thousands of new jobs to boot. How? By adopting several common-sense policies to save energy and investing more in clean-energy research. So concludes a new report focused on […]
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Dark Secret of World Water Day: Coal-Fired Plants Drink 1.5 Trillion Gallons
Here’s a sobering fact on World Water Day: Coal-fired power plants use approximately 1.5 trillion gallons of water a year in the US. In many respects, some folks might use more water flicking on their lights, than chugging back a glass of that wondrous stuff. Makes you wonder: Has the EPA ever tabulated the […]
