Climate Climate & Energy
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What would you do with $700 billion?
A little while back CNN hosted an interesting discussion called “dreaming of a climate bailout.” It ran through a few ideas for what $700 billion could do if spent on green initiatives. (3,700 90MW offshore wind farms! Etc.) It’s worth reading. Also dear to my heart is this elegant op-ed from James Carroll. It points […]
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‘What is a carbon cap and how will it cure our oil addiction?’
A contest to explain something that isn’t true — what a novelty. If I were running a contest, it would be, "What is a carbon cap and why should it not cover the transportation sector?" But I digress. So I get an email from the Environmental Defense Fund asking me to direct my readers to […]
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The cheapest sources of new electricity are also the cleanest
This slide comes from a recent powerpoint presentation by FERC Commissioner Jon Wellinghoff — hardly what you’d call a green radical (click for a larger version): Note that the cheapest sources of new delivered electricity are also the cleanest. Happy news, right?
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Economic downturn and falling oil push green off the priority list, yet again
I keep saying this, possibly to the point of tedium, but I really want to drive it home: as long as going green is viewed as an expensive and vaguely altruistic undertaking, it will never be a top priority. Evidence is everywhere right now. After several years of ceaseless focus on climate and pop culture […]
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Canadian oil sands will pollute the Great Lakes
Speaking of studies on oil sands, there’s another one out of the University of Toronto showing that oil sands will pollute the Great Lakes, reversing decades of cleanup efforts in the region. "This expansion promises to bring with it an exponential increase in pollution, discharges into waterways including the Great Lakes, destruction of wetlands, toxic […]
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Why current cap-and-trade proposals are more tax than trade
A great frustration for those who (a) really care about reducing CO2, and (b) believe in the power of well-structured market mechanisms is that the current discussion around carbon policy has bastardized the language of environmental economics. There are tremendous economic and environmental benefits to be gained by a true cap-and-trade CO2 system. Unfortunately, all […]
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Nuclear proponents are, like, totally John Galt
A few days ago, NYT’s John Tierney wrote a column making what is by now a tediously familiar argument: fears about nuclear are overblown, public sentiment is shifting, and we should build a bunch of nuclear plants. There’s some absurdly tendentious material about California’s electricity situation, but in effect the entire argument hinges on a […]
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Municipal property assessment financing for solar and energy efficiency
The implosion of credit markets could mean severe problems for people looking to finance an investment in energy efficiency or solar. Frankly, financial innovation is as important as technological innovation when it comes to bringing solar into the mainstream. But now you don’t have to take some guy on a blog’s word for it — […]
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Inhofe digs deeper
“I think I was right on that … It’s not whether or not we’re going into a global warming period. We were. We’re not now. You know, God’s still up there. We’re now going through a cooling spell.” — Sen. James Inhofe, in an Oct. 7 debate with Democratic challenger Andrew Rice, defending his notorious […]
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A price on carbon will not tackle transportation pollution
A new study [PDF, via WSJ] from the Congressional Budget Office “discovers” something I guess I kind of thought was common knowledge: realistically, no price on carbon will ever be high enough to substantially curtail driving in the U.S. Even $200/ton carbon — wildly outside the range of anything Americans will accept — would only […]
