Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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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 […]
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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 […]
