Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Upstream carbon prices will not substantially change downstream carbon-emitting behavior
With apologies to Little Milton. Good news: With the incoming Obama administration, we are finally going to get some sort of a greenhouse gas (GHG) bill. Bad news: We are still having an inane, economically uninformed conversation about GHG policy. Many of the ideas that pass for Serious GHG Policy are silly, not because they […]
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A concentrated solar BACT for new coal?
I recently listed a bunch of Best Available Control Technologies (BACT) for limiting CO2 emissions from new coal plants, following the landmark ruling by the EPA Environmental Appeals Board. But a leading expert on solar thermal baseload power points out that I left out one potential control technology. Under the auspices of the Electric Power […]
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Q: Does Dingell-Boucher have meaningful auctioning of CO2 permits before 2026?
A: No. The Dingell-Boucher climate bill has been criticized by many for having weak targets over the next two decades (see here). And even moderate Senators have doubts about using offsets as a major cost-containment strategy: "The emissions don’t have to be actually reduced," [Bingaman] said. "Instead, everyone can buy offsets that turn out not […]
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Coal stocks drop in wake of EPA Bonanza decision
A friend wrote and suggested that I check the stock prices for coal companies in the wake of Thursday’s EPA decision. Well looky here! As of Friday: Peabody Energy Corp Change: 2.40 (8.14%) Arch Coal Inc Change: 2.22 (12.28%) Duke Energy CorpChange: 0.47 (2.92%) Couldn’t happen to a nicer industry.
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Not investment advice
According to the DOE (see this excellent powerpoint [PDF] by the DOE Solar America program), U.S. electricity demand will grow by 386 terrawatt hours by 2015. According to the EPA, those new electrons won’t come from coal. And there’s no way nukes could come on-line fast enough, even if they got their way. Where are […]
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The British love Obama too, and hope he’ll inspire climate action
First things first: We love Barack Obama here in Britain, maybe almost as much as you do. Possibly there are disappointed Republican sympathizers in the U.K., but I haven’t met any, and relief at the retreat of Sarah Palin as political force is almost palpable. Across much of Northern Europe we liked Obama so much […]
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Droughts and desalination in Australia — another amplifying feedback
Our never-ending quest to identify all the amplifying climate feedbacks takes us back to Australia: The worst drought in a century, especially in Australia’s most populated and fastest growing regions, has forced state governments to make expensive, and in some quarters unpopular, decisions to secure water supply. As rainfall dwindles, new dams are a less-than-promising […]
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Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus
There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then. So begins an excellent review article [PDF] in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley, and John Fleck. I had […]
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Acidifying oceans need to be addressed, says litigous green group
The U.S. EPA should use the Clean Water Act to address the growing problem of ocean acidification, says the Center for Biological Diversity — and if the agency doesn’t act, it’s gonna get sued.
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Cut defense spending in favor of clean-energy investing
Conventional wisdom, that dour specter, seems to be saying we don’t have enough money to fix many of our biggest problems, such as global warming or shifting to carbon-free energy. But wait! The Pentagon itself has determined that there are plenty of resources that the Defense Department could do without, according to the Boston Globe: […]
