Climate Climate & Energy

Climate science doesn’t rely on a consensus of opinion

Salon liked my post "How do we really know humans are causing global warming?" but wanted something more in-depth and ... serious. The result is "The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there's no consensus about global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome]."

James Hansen read the first draft and wrote me back, "Very important for the public to understand this -- why has nobody articulated this already?" I don't know the answer. All I can say is that while I was writing the article, the central point dawned on me:

Radiohead frontman leads climate campaign

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is once again leading Friends of the Earth’s Big Ask Campaign. (Hey, he likes Big Ask and he cannot lie.) The campaign calls on 17 countries and the European Union to sign on to legally binding, yearly greenhouse-gas emissions targets. More specifically, FoE is asking the E.U. to adopt a target […]

Daylight-saving time leads to higher energy use, says study

Daylight-saving time was enacted as an energy-saving measure, but when time springs forward on March 9, people may actually use more energy, says a new study. When all of Indiana began to participate in daylight-saving time — before 2006, only 15 of the state’s 92 counties would spring forward and fall back — researchers at […]

Is ‘ethanol’ short for ‘laundered coal’?

Wow! Now that the caucuses are safely behind us, an Iowa paper notices that "ethanol" is how corporations and troglodyte utilities pronounce "laundered coal," AKA, The Enemy of the Human Race.

Specifically, 300 tons a day, per plant. Here's an Orwell-Award winning statement for you:

Officials with Alliant Energy, which has proposed a new coal-fired plant in Marshalltown, told the Iowa Utilities Board recently that if Iowans want renewable energy, they will need more electricity from coal plants.

Apparently if you don't want coal you need to use more of it. QED.

Alaskan village sues Big Fossil Fuel over link to climate change

The tiny village of Kivalina, built on a barrier reef in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against 24 oil, coal, and power companies, alleging that Big Fossil Fuel’s greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to the climate-change-caused coastal erosion that threatens the village’s very existence. Kivalina says that the companies should pay for its relocation. […]

Wow

Aside from being substantively misleading, this is just really, really awful. Doesn’t CEI have enough money to hire a video editor?

Conventional energy vs. renewable energy

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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As all eyes turn toward Texas this week in advance of the Democratic primary, we will see a state that is beginning its transition to a new energy economy. Texas is grappling with a shift the entire nation faces -- and as usual, it's doing it on a big scale.

When it comes to energy and to carbon emissions, Texas is a place of superlatives and contrasts. It has more solar, wind, and biomass resources that any other state; but it's also No. 1 in total carbon emissions.

It is the ancestral home of Big Oil, but it also hosts the world's largest wind farms. It has a very successful renewable energy portfolio standard, but it also has two nuclear power plants in the pipeline to provide power to its rapidly growing population.

A year ago in a watershed deal, a private equity firm working with environmentalists arranged a $45 billion buyout of the state's largest power producer, TXU. As part of the deal, eight of 11 planned new coal-fired power plants were cancelled. However, as many as nine new coal plants remain in the pipeline.

In Texas, we see a contest between conventional and renewable energy resources, and between the past and the future.

Solar photovoltaic cells are quite eco-friendly, says research

Are photovoltaic cells truly easy on the earth when manufacturing is factored in? If the question’s been keeping you up at night, rest easy: According to a solar-cell life-cycle analysis to be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they are.

South Fla. power outage

There’s seems to be some confusion out there about exactly what happened in South Florida today, but as far as I can tell, some power lines went out at a substation, which caused a nuclear plant to automatically shut down, which caused power outages for upwards of 3 million people. Nice grid. I liked this […]

Notable quotable

“I have the same feelings about wind as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” — financier and oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens