Climate Climate & Energy
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Carbon neutral caution
There’s been a lot of ambitious talk lately about carbon neutrality. It’s exciting stuff, but it’s worth pausing to consider just how huge that challenge is. And what, precisely, does it mean? Zero emissions, or lots of offsets? I thought it was interesting to take a look at the climate action plan from the city […]
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The State of Electricity Prices
I was messing around with some spreadsheets, and out popped this little guy: The chart plots the 50 states — minus Hawaii but plus DC — with the price of electricity on the vertical axis and consumption on the horizontal axis. (I left off Hawaii because it’s a serious outlier, with average electricity prices nearly twice as high […]
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Dumb grids
The smart grid conversation is stupid. Policies to encourage smart grids are at best minor distractions, and at worst contrary to the public interest. Smart grids are also the key to cleaning up and modernizing the electric system. These sentences are not in conflict with one another. The smart grid is the cart, not the […]
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The Climate Post: Uptick in denialism halts glacier melt, lowers sea levels
First things first: “The absence of an actual bill” is one impediment to the Senate taking up climate legislation, The Hill reported earlier this week. The climate leadership troika of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) continue to work behind the scenes to steer the many interests toward a common […]
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Know your solar
Concerns about global warming, rising fossil fuel prices, and oil insecurity have prompted calls for a new energy economy, one that replaces fossil fuels with renewables. The sun is an enormous reservoir of energy; in fact, the sunlight reaching Earth in just one hour is enough to power the global economy for a whole year. […]
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What’s the proper role of individuals and institutions in addressing climate change?
This may seem like a trivial question with an obvious answer. But what really is the proper role for individuals and institutions in addressing climate change? An immediate and natural response may be that everyone should do their part. Let’s see what that really means. Decisions affecting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for example, are made […]
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The do-nothing energy tax: $3 gasoline dead ahead
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The mounds of snow blackened by auto exhaust have barely melted in Washington, D.C, yet the Energy Information Administration’s Short Term Energy Outlook already predicts that average gas prices “will exceed $3 per gallon” in coming months: Average U.S. pump prices likely will exceed $3 per gallon at times during […]
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A messy but practical strategy for phasing out the U.S. coal fleet
By 2030, we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases from coal. That conclusion is most famously associated with NASA’s climate chief James Hansen, but Hansen is not alone. In a recent paper, nine other climate scientists — David Beerling, Robert Berner, Pushker Kharecha, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Paganini, Maureen Raymo, Dana Royer, Makiko Sato, and James […]
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On rooftops worldwide, a solar water heating revolution
The harnessing of solar energy is expanding on every front as concerns about climate change and energy security escalate, as government incentives for harnessing solar energy expand, and as these costs decline while those of fossil fuels rise. One solar technology that is really beginning to take off is the use of solar thermal collectors […]
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010 Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy
Photo courtesy of, ah, Bitchcakes via Flickr Alec Baldwin weighs in, but which is better, coal or nuclear? The official response to that question by most environmental organizations is to say “neither.” Neither? Are they are privy to a secret consensus finding of multiple, detailed, peer-reviewed, scientific studies which have demonstrated that when all negative […]
