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Eric Corey Freed extrapolates on his recommendations in the NYT
Monday I wrote “Ignore NYT’s Green Home column.” I was critical both of the author Julie Scelfo and Eric Corey Freed, the author of Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies. But having corresponded with Freed, it seems that his recommendations were taken somewhat out of context. He in fact provided a rough list of 20 […]
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Southern Company embraces the only affordable way to ‘capture’ emissions at a coal plant today
The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO2 emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass (see here). Today, Energy Daily ($ub. req’d) reports on the huge — but little covered — news from one of the nation’s biggest carbon […]
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Big Oil [hearts] biofuels
Update [2009-3-19 12:37:25 by Tom Philpott]:Also on the theme of Big Oil loving biofuels: Valero Energy, the largest U.S. oil refiner, just snapped up seven ethanol plants from bankrupt ethanol maker Verasun for $1 billion. To get the plants, Valero beat out corn-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland, which had bid $700 million. ——————- From Reuters: […]
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The DOE’s annual biofuels conference doesn’t inspire confidence
Team Ethanol got together recently at the Department of Energy for Biomass 2009: Fueling Our Future — a conference on all things biofuel. Needless to say, they’re still singing the same old song. More subsidies, a higher blend wall (a cheer that USDA Chief Tom Vilsack knows well) and much crowing over the promise of […]
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DOE has nuclear energy in its bloodstream
Stephanie Cooke shares an inconvenient truth about the Energy Department: Given the department’s origins, it is not surprising that nuclear programs have won out over other energy technologies. Of the $135.4 billion spent on energy research and development from 1948 to 2005 (in constant 2004 dollars), more than half, or $74 billion, went to nuclear […]
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Time to get charged up about advances in smaller, faster lithium-ion batteries
Battery advances seems to be flowing as fast as electrons these days — and super fast charging batteries may hit the market in as little as 2 to 3 years. And that’s critical because the car of the very near future, plug in hybrids, are a core climate solution (see here). And electricity is the […]
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How would rebating carbon revenue to taxpayers give anyone incentive to reduce emissions?
There are lots of people who want to return money raised by a carbon program back to taxpayers via rebates. (A “revenue neutral carbon tax” is one way to do this; “cap and dividend” is another; Obama’s proposal is to auction pollution permits and return roughly 80 percent of the revenue via payroll tax rebates.) […]
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The net’s best introduction to the smart grid
Lynne Kiesling is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics and in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, a member of the GridWise Architecture Council, and the proprietor of the excellent blog Knowledge Problem. She has written the best general introduction to the smart grid available (and I’ve read a lot of […]
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Water too often overlooked in development efforts, U.N. report says
ISTANBUL — Fresh water and money have one thing in common: Their mismanagement has left billions of people without ready access to either, according to policymakers, non-governmental agencies and activists attending the World Water Forum here this week. AquaFed’s Gerard Payen (Courtesy U.N.) It was one of the few things all parties seem to agree […]
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U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists
In the last two years, our scientific understanding of business-as-usual projections for global warming has changed dramatically (see here and here). Yet, much of the U.S. public — especially conservatives — remain in the dark about just how dire the situation is (see here). Why? Because the U.S. media is largely ignoring the story. Case […]
