Climate Climate & Energy

Venture-capital star ain’t no clean-tech expert

Vinod Khosla may be a "venture-capital star" who is now putting a lot of money into biofuels -- but he is no clean-tech expert, as he proved during a keynote address at ThinkEquity Partners' ThinkGreen conference in San Francisco. In remarks that should worry anybody relying on his judgment, Khosla said:

Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.

Today: Thomas Ring

Recently, Senator James Inhofe published a list of 400 "prominent scientists" who have recently voiced significant objections mainstream climate science. In response to this list, I recently blogged that many of those listed lacked qualifications (see also here).

I'm betting that Sen. Inhofe doesn't want you to actually read the list of skeptics, but just read the headline and accept their conclusion. Here at Grist, however, we don't do what the good senator wants us to do very often. So in the spirit of non-compliance, I'm going to institute a semi-regular series where I examine the qualifications of some of the "experts" on the Inhofe 400 list.

Italian village first host to outbreak of spreading tropical disease

Congratulations to Castiglione di Cervia, Italy, the first place in modern Europe to feel one dismal effect of a warming world: a tropical disease out of its natural habitat. This summer, more than 100 people in the village of 2,000 came down with fever, exhaustion, and terrible bone pain later found to be caused by […]

Unlike the U.S., European governments are cutting back on agrofuel goodies

European biodiesel makers have entered a rough patch. The price for their main feedstock, rapeseed, has risen more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year. But the price of the final product, biodiesel, has plunged, because producers are churning out far more biodiesel than the market can absorb. Similar conditions hold sway among […]

The poverty of fossil fuels becomes apparent

Martin Wolf makes what I think is a really bad argument in the Financial Times:

We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely ...

This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge -- indeed, they are already emerging -- within and among countries.

China releases energy white paper, plans to boost renewables R&D

China has released its first-ever white paper on energy policy, stating that the country “attaches great importance to environmental protections and prevention of global climate change” and plans to give “top priority to developing renewable energy” as a long-term pollution solution. That includes wind, solar, natural gas, and nuclear, as well as a continuation of […]

New developments in solar power make ‘clean coal’ look even dumber

Let me be the last in the greenosphere to note that Nanosolar has shipped its first panels, and it’s no exaggeration to say that this moment will likely be seen as a historical turning point. For a taste of the breathless anticipation around Nanosolar, read "innovation of the year" over on PopSci (or this recent […]

Plenty of reading to occupy you over the holidays

It’s been a hectic few months in the climate/energy world, so I’ve got a lot of leftover bits and pieces waiting for attention. As in … about 35 open tabs in my browser. The last thing I want when I get back from the holidays is a browser full of guilt, so I’m dumping ’em. […]

‘Stop using so much oil’

A great little story today in Tom Rick's Inbox, from the Washington Post's military correspondent:

Renewables are pulling two directions, nationwide and local

Recently a study found that wind can serve as reliable baseload power. The key is to link wind farms together with a high-speed transmission grid. "This study implies that, if interconnected wind is used on a large scale, a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power, and the remaining […]