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Steven Chu chats with Charlie Rose
Chu starts about 21 minutes in: [vodpod id=Video.1420705&w=425&h=350&fv=docId%3D-8696557984325524065%26playerMode%3Dsimple%26hl%3Den]
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Scientists and science writers take Will to task in the WaPo
I didn’t follow the George Will Climate Crank Controversy very closely on this blog. You can read a comprehensive play-by-play from Adam Siegel here. The good news is, two new shots were fired today by the forces of sanity, in the pages of the Washington Post, which hosted Will’s original idiocy. The first is an […]
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Dear Nancy Sutley: Get it right on mountaintop removal
As a new round of explosives shattered the ridges across mountaintop removal mines in Boone and Raleigh counties in West Virginia yesterday, unleashed by a recent U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision, White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley gave the first indications that the Obama administration plans to act promptly on […]
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Glenn Beck attacks smart grid as socialist plot to steal our thermostats
This post originally appeared at the Wonk Room. Glenn Beck, the conservative ideologue whose show is mocked by fellow Fox News anchors, recently attacked plans to modernize our electric grid. After Carol Browner, President Obama’s climate and energy adviser, said that a smart grid means “we can get to a system where an electric company […]
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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 […]
