Climate Climate & Energy
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Doerr and Immelt: To become the green tech leader, we need a price and a cap on carbon
The Washington Post finally let through a good op-ed, “Falling Behind On Green Tech,” by John Doerr partner in VC Kleiner Perkins and Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE. As I’ve been saying for over a decade now, the U.S. has lost its lead to other countries because conservatives have blocked the policies needed […]
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Sen. Dorgan: “It’s very hard for Congress to do… a couple of really big issues at the same time.”
Apparently, the latest complaint from what is supposedly the world’s most exclusive deliberative body is that it’s just too damn much for the American public to expect that their elected representatives deal with more than one big issue – health care and climate – at the same time. As the WashPost reports in a story […]
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GOP opposes successful “Cash for Clunkers”
I was not a big fan of the final version of “Cash for Clunkers” because its mileage improvement requirements were so inadequate, as Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) explained here. But in the real world, the public has mostly turned in gas-guzzlers in exchange for fuel-efficient cars – which perhaps should not […]
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“Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?”*
Someone sent me a terrific set of the “deniers rules for debate” from Mercurius. Let me introduce them by way of a February 2008 email exchange I had with a denier over the headline question (see here). The denier wrote: I have been doing enormous amounts of research in this global warming (caused by man) […]
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A clear voice for science?
I really like Earth and Sky’s podcast, just not the part about it being a mouthpiece for Shell Oil lately. Sad but true. I’ve been listening to it for half a year on my device, and it seems like nearly once a week, this daily 2 minute podcast, which claims to be heard 100 million […]
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Despite its many flaws, EIA analysis of climate bill agrees with every other credible ACES study
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that the Energy Information Administration (EIA) doesn’t fully model the House climate and clean energy bill (they utterly ignore a major cost containment provision and the clean energy bank, while underestimating likely efficiency gains). The EIA analysis, “Energy Market and Economic Impacts of H.R. 2454, the American […]
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eSolar launches power tower concentrated solar thermal plant – live video cast today, 1 pm EDT
Watch eSolar’s launch live here at 10 am PDT. CEO Bill Gross will be joined by David Meyers, Executive Director of The Wildlands Conservancy, and leading clean energy experts Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley and Google.org’s Dan Reicher (my boss from DOE days) . Below is a fascinating video from a recent episode of National […]
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Meat, climate change, and industry tripe
Washington Post food-politics columnist Ezra Klein has taken a stand: people should eat less meat, because of its vast greenhouse gas footprint. To make his case, Ezra cited the FAO’s landmark “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report, which found that global meat production is responsible for 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. To be honest, when […]
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More gas contamination affects Pennsylvania residents
Pennsylvania environment officials are investigating another natural gas well leak, after residents near the town of Roaring Branch complained last month that rust-colored water was flowing from a spring and two small creeks were bubbling with methane gas. The incident is the latest in a string of more than 50 similar cases related to gas […]
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The good news about energy efficiency
Conventional wisdom has it that the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is going to be long, expensive, and painful for consumers; efficiency can at best defray the costs. It may not be visible to the casual news consumer, but that climate/energy CW is substantially shaped by economic modeling. I’ve argued in the past that such […]