Climate Climate & Energy
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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, […]
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Vital realism
Bryan Walsh: “Shellenberger and Nordhaus have injected a vital strain of realism into an issue far too critical to founder on green dreams.” Discuss.
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Nuke bites man
The Nuclear Energy Agency — an international agency created by the OECD to "assist its Member countries in maintaining and further developing, through international co-operation, the scientific, technological and legal bases required for the safe, environmentally friendly and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" — issues a report claiming that nuclear power is […]
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Green journos: Scientific and idealistic and ignorant and cootie-covered
MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman pens a truly incoherent and dunderheaded attack on environmental journalists. Look at this mess, taken from the middle of the piece: Beyond sticking to a few catch-phrases and earnestly spouting a do-good philosophy gleaned from Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the media aren’t doing much to try to explain the green […]
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UCS on CCS
The Union of Concerned Scientists recently put out a new report on "clean coal." The conclusion: The UCS report, “Coal Power in a Warming World,” proposes that the federal government fund five to 10 full-scale demonstration projects to test carbon-capture-and-storage technology’s ability to cut coal power plant emissions. The report also calls for a halt […]
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Economists weigh in on the need for stimulus spending
The New York Times has a heartening story saying that the need for stimulus spending is widely accepted: But the extra spending, a sore point in normal times, has been widely accepted on both sides of the political aisle as necessary to salvage the banking system and avert another Great Depression. “Right now would not […]
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Solar industry aims for grid parity in eight years
Solar companies are getting some swagger: “We designed the eight-year tax credit extension very purposely,” said Rhone Resch, president of Solar Energy Industries Association. “We believe that at the end of that time, solar will have achieved grid parity, which means simply that we will be the lowest-cost source of retail electricity in almost all […]
