Climate Climate & Energy
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Australia continues to deal with epic drought
Longstanding drought has wreaked havoc across Australia, drying up lakes into shallow, acidic puddles and threatening drinking-water supplies. Unable to coax rain from the sky, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has fast-tracked a plan to buy back water entitlements from the heaviest irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin, an agricultural stronghold which produces all of the country’s […]
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Colbert on offshore drilling
As you can see toward the end there, everything comes down to the fact that nobody — outside of rarefied energy experts — believes that alternatives to fossil fuels are here, ready, and reliable. Everything hinges on getting that message out.
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Cleveland brewery attempts energy recyling yet is foiled by regulation
Last week Cleveland Scene wrote about a local brewery that is recovering its waste heat. They set out to convert the heat into electricity and useful steam for their brewery. In a great quote, the owner Patrick Conway says: “When our engineer explained this technology to us,” says Patrick, “it was like putting wheels on […]
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‘Clean’ coal pollutes more, finds new study
This should be obvious, but of course you never hear it mentioned in stories about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS): capturing and sequestering carbon requires lots of energy; thus, plants that do it have to burn more coal to create that extra energy; thus, the other pollutants created by mixing, transporting, and burning coal will […]
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Priorities
From earth2tech: In the last two days, the Department of Energy has announced $24 million worth of new investments in solar energy while also revealing it’s putting a whopping $340 million into yet more clean coal research. In conjunction with the funding announcements, the DOE says it’s "committed to … developing the technologies that will […]
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More ideas for a post-oil society
This is the fifth in a series on how we can build an energy future based on our best science and no longer critically dependent upon exhaustible and polluting fossil fuels. Promoting battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles Governments can play a key role in promoting electric vehicles by buying electric vehicles en masse and […]
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New England ISO’s forward capacity market
A guest post by a writer with more than 30 years in energy and the environment with government, private industry, and the nation’s leading think tanks. He currently works for the federal government and will be blogging in anonymity until he leaves public service. — One of the more serious structural flaws in energy policy […]
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Journalists need to evaluate strength of scientific consensus
One of the biggest problems in the climate change debate is the fact that many people out there fail to understand the finer points of “scientific consensus.” For an example of this misunderstanding, see Ron Rosenbaum’s recent article in Slate. (h/t Dot Earth.) His article trots out one of the staples of the denial industry: […]
