Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Complaint cites health threats at Alabama dump taking TVA’s spilled coal ash
An Alabama creekkeeper has filed a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency citing health threats including runoff containing alarmingly high arsenic levels at a bankrupt landfill that’s taking hundreds of millions of gallons of coal ash spilled from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston coal plant. The Arrowhead Landfill — owned by Perry County Associates and […]
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Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers
More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for […]
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Remaking the Global Climate Framework
Two months ago, hundreds of world leaders and tens of thousands of activists gathered in Copenhagen to craft a new global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Green groups put on a spectacle – yes, Greenpeace even docked two of its famous boats nearby to “help in pushing the delegates” – and some […]
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Collateral Damage of Clean Coal
No American leader has done more to advance a clean energy future than President Obama. Nor has any American president done more to invoke a mandate for stricter workplace safety and environmental regulations. And yet, ever since President Obama first visited my native southern Illinois coalfields in 1997 on a golf outing with a fellow […]
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Save Winter – Stop the Oil Sands
Every day it seems as if we see another energy company trying to convince us of new ways to keep us tied to oil and coal. Yet these fuels always turn out to be dirtier and more expensive, especially when their environmental costs are considered. Liquid coal is one of these same old fossil fuels […]
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Climate and political tipping points
There’s a famous quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” However, according to Wikipedia, it may be that this concept was first expressed by a U.S. labor leader, Nicholas Klein of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, in 1914. According to a report […]
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Data highlights on the global food supply
World agriculture today faces pressure from many sources. On the production side, the amount of unused arable land worldwide has dwindled. Overworked soils are becoming eroded and degraded, and overpumped aquifers are being depleted. Meanwhile, as the global population grows and increasing biofuel production converts grain into fuel for cars, demand for food continues to […]
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Earthquake wake-up call in Chicago
Road damage following an earthquake. Photo: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center CollectionI wonder if anyone on President Obama’s new Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage felt a slight rumble of concern when a 3.8-magnitude earthquake struck across Kane County in Illinois on Wednesday. The earthquake, minor compared to the 5.2-magnitude earthquake that shook […]
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The 10 greenest and brownest things about Vancouver
Courtesy Ecstaticist via FlickrAll eyes are on are Vancouver this month — not just on the Olympics, but on the city itself. Is the world’s biggest athletic circus making the city a better place to live in the long term? A worse one? Or is it just putting the global spotlight on strengths and weaknesses […]
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Global weirding, East Coast snow storms, and Vancouver’s snow shortage
The other day someone made the cleverest quip: “Hey Al Gore, how do you like your global warming now that it’s snowing and snow is cold, Al Gore?” If only someone had made such a comment on the internet, or possibly Twitter; then I could link to it. Do such comments deserve serious responses? No. […]
