Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
-
U.S. responsible for 29 percent of CO2 emissions over past 150 years, triple China’s share
Since the mid-1800s, U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, accounted for 29% of the global total. Those 328,000 million metric tons of cumulative emissions are the most of any country and more than three times the amount emitted by China over the same period (93,000 MtCO2), according to data from the World […]
-
Top U.S. climate negotiator to speak on China and the global climate challenge
Is any question more central to averting climate catastophe than “the challenges and the opportunities of working with China in the context of our broader climate and clean-energy policy”? On Wednesday, 10:30 to 11:30 EST, the Center for American Progress will be hearing from Todd Stern, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change on that very […]
-
Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse
Hurricane season officially begins tomorrow. So I’m updating one more 2008 post on the science. Last September, Nature published a major analysis that supports my 2-parter (Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 and Part 2). As Nature explained: … scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so […]
-
Van Jones on Clean Energy Jobs from “humble hard-working energy efficiency”
The Center for American Progress Action fund had a recent event on clean energy jobs keynoted by Van Jones, who is not the President’s “green-jobs czar,” but “the green-jobs handyman.” Besides being the administration’s point person on clean energy jobs, he is the best speaker on the subject — because he studies rhetoric and persuasive […]
-
How to shut down 93% of coal without building new plants or reducing power supply
Two interesting observations: 50% of U.S. power generation (in MWh) comes from coal, while only 20% comes from natural gas. 32% of total U.S. power generation capacity (in MW) is coal-fired, while 42% is gas-fired. When it runs, the natural gas fleet emits just 50% of the CO2 of the coal fleet, which raises a […]
-
Can human rights be the climate movement’s moral guide?
Courtesy of Three DegreesI’m spending this Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on climate change and human rights, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. Some 40 speakers—mostly legal scholars, but also public health experts, NGO leaders, trial lawyers, and political organizers—are gathered to debate the future of the law as […]
-
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 […]
