Climate Climate & Energy
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Sole "Strategic Partner" of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia's "dirty coal" state of
Climate Progress is beginning a multipart series on what has been called the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering. This historic but controversial event will take place March 22 – 26 in Asilomar, CA. Details can be found here on the website of the conference “developer,” Dr. Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund. I have been interviewing leading […]
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Time to bury cheap coal
In 2009, nearly 15,000 megawatts of proposed coal fired power plants were canceled. To put that in perspective, that would represent about a third of all electricity generating capacity of a state the size of California. This is not a consequence of a slow economy alone; eight years ago, 36,000 megawatts of new coal plants […]
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Guess what? Salesmen sell things
I keep wating for a credible author to write a piece about the alleged “nuclear renaissance” that doesn’t make me gag a little. Today will not be that day. Hendrik Hertzberg writes a piece for the New Yorker that basically repeats all the same names and talking points, but goes one step further: this passage […]
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Daylight saving time doesn’t save energy
You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was. The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject. What’s germane […]
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The Septical Environmentalist (sic) says 16 feet of sea level rise wouldn't b
Another op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg, another Gish Gallup of non-stop disinformation. The good news is that the task of debunking the Septical Environmentalist (sic), has been made easier by the publication of whole book dedicated to that tedious task, The Lomborg Deception. And yes, “Septical Environmentalist” is not a typo. Sure, it may seem like […]
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Could San Francisco Launch a Coal-Free City Eco-Tourism Campaign?
“San Francisco: Where the Power is Clean and Life is Good” Hey kids! Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge without a film of mercury! Bring grandma and stroll through Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf free from the thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide emissions, as well as the particulate matter that […]
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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 […]
