Climate Climate & Energy
All Stories
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Q. Does daylight savings time save energy?
A. According to this UC Berkeley Energy Institute study [PDF], DST does not save energy. Usage goes up about 1 percent, mostly due to people calling other people to tell them to change their clocks. A better solution would be to just have permanent summer.
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Green investment does create jobs
Robert Pollin has issued a direct rebuttal, “Green Investments and Jobs,” to the Heritage Foundation’s lame “debunking” of Green Recovery, a study Pollin co-authored for the the Center for American Progress. My line-by-line response to the disanalysis by Heritage’s Donald Kreutzer is here. Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at U. Mass-Amherst, concludes: […]
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Scientists eye rock that converts CO2 to solid mineral
A rock that converts carbon dioxide into a solid mineral form could be wrangled into the global-warming fight, say geologists publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The rock, called peridotite, is found commonly in Earth’s mantle but occasionally shows up on the surface of the globe as well, mainly in the continent […]
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Current climate warming trend hottest since human civilization began, study says
The current climate warming trend the Earth is experiencing is the most dramatic climate change since human civilization began some 5,000 years ago, according to a new Cornell University study published in the journal Ecology. Researchers also studied ecosystem changes caused by warming and glacial melt in the Arctic and North Atlantic and found major […]
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E.U. greenhouse-gas goal will be tough to meet, says IEA
A European Union goal to keep global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius will be, um, hard to do, says the International Energy Agency. “The scale of the challenge … is immense,” says a report to be published next week. “The technology shift, if achievable, would certainly be unprecedented in scale and speed […]
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Fungus in rainforest foliage has promise as biofuel
A fungus hiding out in the trees of a Patagonian rainforest could be “a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment,” according to the scientist who accidentally discovered it.
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EPA investigator blows the whistle on BP oil spill case
Way back in March 2006, BP pipelines ruptured and dumped tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil all over the Alaskan tundra. It was the biggest oil spill since the Exxon-Valdez. There was a criminal investigation. And then … there wasn’t. What happened? Seattle’s King 5 has broken the story: Scott West, a top […]
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The Epstein alternative
Paul Epstein responds to a recent NYT story on the much-ballyhooed “nuclear revival” with a letter to the editor: There are many reasons to balk at constructing new nuclear power plants. Safety, storage, and security are significant obstacles, the last two of which may be insurmountable. Ten seismic faults lie within a 20-mile radius of […]
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Decoupling 101: Of triage and panaceas
Decoupling is all the rage. The Obama campaign has made it a key part of their plan (as David gushed here), and many states have instituted decoupling proceedings to change the way that their electric and gas utilities get paid. The good news on decoupling is directional; utilities currently have a strong incentive to keep […]
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Biofuel you can believe in
Flint, Michigan seeks Swedish help in turning human waste into biogas to power buses.
