Climate Climate & Energy

King Corn, meet Big Oil

Drilling for oil in a corn field: will Big Oil squeeze out King Corn?Back in March, Tom Philpott flagged some moves from Shell Oil and Valero Energy (the largest U.S. oil refiner) that indicated Big Oil was falling for biofuels. Now, the NYT shows Tom had it right with a piece detailing the increasing amount […]

The United States of waste

The U.S. economy is incredibly energy inefficient, a key reason even strong climate action has such a low total cost — one tenth of a penny on the dollar. This inefficiency is summed up best in one remarkable statistic that I first learned at the U.S. Department of Energy and then reprinted in my 1999 […]

Memorial Day, 2029

The two worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise, Hell and High Water.  But another impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly than either […]

Energy-related CO2 emissions declined by 2.8 percent in 2008

The Energy Information Administration has released its flash estimate for 2008 energy-related CO2 emissions here.  Factors that contributed to the 2.8% decline in CO2 (and a 2.2% drop in total energy use) include: Energy prices In 2008, gasoline and diesel prices were at their all-time peak level Near the end of the year, despite lower […]

Putting the US in a Strong Position to Secure an International Climate Agreement: Waxman-Markey Bill

The Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (HR 2454) is now out (see here for the full bill and here for NRDC’s top line summary of the entire bill).  The House Energy and Commerce Committee is focused this week on intensive sessions to pass the bill (you can watch it all live on the […]

MIT doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F

Today’s question:  How the heck does the Greenland ice sheet survive accelerated disintegration from projected 20°F warming by the 2090s? I previously blogged on how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change has joined the climate realists — the growing group of scientists who understand that the […]

The iceman walketh

To study the conditions of sea ice, one must walk very carefully across it. Here, two members of the Catlin Arctic Survey team maneuver a supply sled through a rough patch.Courtesy Catlin Arctic Survey To millions around the world, Pen Hadow — the first person ever to trek to the North Pole alone without any […]

Coal Ash Dumped on the Disadvantaged

In December, a coal slurry impoundment owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) gushed 50 times more toxic waste than the Exxon Valdez in a well publicized and inevitable disaster that unjustly ruined many homes and downstream ecosystems. So how to describe what’s happening to the sludge currently being dredged from waterways and swimming pools? […]

Be part of the green solution (and the Manchester Report)

The following post was written by The Guardian’s Dunan Clark The climate change debate often seems to focus more on the problems than on the solutions. It’s not hard to understand why: almost every week brings another scientific report predicting impacts sooner and more devastating than we were previously expecting. With so many gloomy headlines, […]

Sustainable America?