Climate Climate & Energy
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World needs to get crackin’ on CCS, says IEA
John McCain and Barack Obama both like to give lovin’ to “clean coal” — but how much would they be willing to pony up for it? In a new report, the International Energy Agency, assuming that we continue to head into a fossil-fuel-powered future, says that the world needs to invest some $20 billion in […]
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Coal’s position in the energy market is more precarious than is generally acknowledged
As we reported Monday morning, the Bush administration is on the verge of issuing a rule that will make it even easier for mountaintop-removal mining companies to dump toxic crap in the streams of Appalachia. (They do it now, it’s just illegal, albeit never enforced.) You can read Jeff Biggers for more on why this […]
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CCX sells rip-offsets
Richard Sandor and his Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) may be doing more to destroy the credibility of the carbon trading market than anyone in the world, as the Wall Street Journal makes painfully clear. I urge anyone considering throwing their money away on rip-offsets to read the entire piece, “Pollution Credits Let Dumps Double Dip: […]
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New Scientist on how our economy is killing the earth
The graph above comes from the introduction to the New Scientist‘s special report: "How our economy is killing the Earth." It takes the following as its central premise: A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic […]
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Fermi who?
Last week, Jeff Young of Living on Earth spoke to one of the top dogs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, Alex Flint. Read the following exchange and see if it fills you with confidence: FLINT: No, the Fermi plant operates very safely. YOUNG: That’s Alex Flint, the Nuclear Institute’s senior vice president for government affairs. […]
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New report offers five different pictures of life in 2030
Forum on the Future recently released a report, "derived from published studies and consultations with more than 60 climate-change specialists," that describes five possible scenarios for how climate change might affect our collective future. Here’s the happy one, as described by AFP: ENERGY EFFICIENCY: A swift, peaceful transition to a consumerist economy where heat-trapping carbon […]
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Hawaii lei’s out ambitious clean-energy plans
Hawaii’s largest utility has lei’d out plans to help the state source 70 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. Hawaiian Electric Co. has promised to never break ground on another coal plant (yippee!) and will convert existing fossil-fuel generators to local-crop biofuels. Just pour that piña colada in your tank, Hank! “It’s […]
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Government report criticizes U.S. plans for carbon dioxide burial
The following is a guest essay from Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation. —– In the U.S. today we burn coal to make half of all our electricity. This coal emits about 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is 33 percent of all U.S. CO2 emissions [XLS].[1] CO2 […]
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Frontline documentary ‘Heat’ looks at the politics of global warming
The PBS program “Frontline” is premiering a new two-hour documentary about global warming on Tuesday night: Heat, produced by Martin Smith. Though it kicks off with discussion of melting icecaps, it’s way more heavy on the political side of the issue than the scientific. It puts the presidential candidates’ rhetoric on climate change into the […]
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Green policies in California created 1.5 million jobs
A detailed new economic analysis “Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California” [PDF] finds: Over the past thirty-five years, innovative energy efficiency policies created 1.5 million additional fulltime jobs with a total payroll of over $45 billion. Looking forward, the report finds that if California improves energy efficiency by just 1 percent per year, […]
