Climate Climate & Energy

Don’t tell Canis!

This is one of those stories where you don't know whether to be hopeful or depressed after reading it. Like drug addicts who will try snorting every powder in the house, we seem to be willing to subject any substance on the planet to the real acid test of our age: Will it help us keep carburbia going?

More on EPA’s waiver decision

Juliet Eilperin’s got a really crackerjack story on the California waiver in the WaPo. It’s devastating to Johnson. It also confirms a lot of stuff that I, a mere blogger, could only speculate about irresponsibly. First of all, the EPA staff was foursquare against this decision: EPA’s lawyers and policy staff had reached the same […]

TED talks

I keep seeing TED talks referenced here and there. I really need to start checking that site more often. Here are a couple of cool presentations. Amory Lovins on winning the oil endgame (sure to enrage all you car-haters out there): Larry Brilliant makes the case for optimism, or at least that’s what the talk […]

European automakers in a snit over proposed EU emissions cuts

A European Union proposal to reduce average new-car CO2 emissions 20 percent by 2012 — and to fine automakers that don’t meet the target — has revved up observers on all sides. German Chancellor Angela Merkel — a climate Cassandra whose country is home to industry giants including Porsche, BMW, and DaimlerChrysler — took a […]

Coal industry kicks off a PR campaign aimed at influencing lawmakers

Santa moonlighting on K Street? Photo: iStockphoto I heard from someone in downtown D.C. this morning who ran into a guy in a Santa suit who handed him a flier saying, "even Santa is rethinking his position on coal!" Yes, really. From The Hill: Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) is sending 30 Santas to […]

Efficiency without renewable energy is not sufficient

Recently George Monbiot argued that humanity must figure out a way to leave the fossil fuels in the ground:

Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate our lofts, turn our televisions off at the wall. In other words, they have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I can determine, not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to reduce the supply of fossil fuel. So the demand-side policy will fail. Every barrel of oil and tonne of coal that comes to the surface will be burned.

In other words, things like fuel economy standards and efficient appliances won't help unless cars and appliances are powered by renewable energy (solar/wind/geothermal).

The problem might be more manageable if we divide it into three parts:

1. Active energy sources -- wind/solar/geothermal.
2. Passive energy sources -- mostly in buildings, as detailed in David's recent excellent post .
3. Design -- as in how to design cities, towns, and the their transportation systems.

Once we have moved to renewable electricity and passive systems as the source of almost all of our energy needs, then we can keep the rest of the fossil fuels in the ground.

Climate skeptic plays hookey

The great climate debate was supposed to be yesterday, but it was not to be. My opponent, Dr. Tim Ball, was a no-show. He knew the debate started at 2:00 p.m., but got the time zone wrong. After he figured that out, his phone stopped working. Go figure.

So it was just me, and I spent about 75 minutes answering questions that readers had left on Eric Berger's Sciguy site, as well as taking questions from the phone lines. Many of the questions were interesting and reasonable, and I very much appreciate the people that posed them.

However, what would a climate change debate be without a few wackos?

One caller asked (and later emailed me the same question):

I would like to know if you really believe you and others like you can manage the climate of this planet? As the Wizard of Oz found out, there are unforeseen consequences to your actions.

That's right, if the Wizard can't make good policy concerning flying monkeys, witches, and Judy Garland, what chance do we have of handling climate change? This caller will most definitely not like my suggestion that we geoengineer a cooler climate by sending up flying monkeys carrying mirrors to reflect sunlight back to space.

Grist contributor bashes ‘clean coal’

If you’d like to see our very own Sean Casten call the FutureGen clean coal project “maddeningly stupid” — about the only part of this segment that isn’t creepy and upsetting — you can do so here.

Thirteen stories of coal getting stiffed

The other day I was thinking I should gather together in one place all the stories from this year about coal getting rejected. And I was feeling lazy, and wishing someone else would do it for me. And look, someone else did! Check it out below the fold: Following are some of the coal plant […]

How much global warming results from air travel?

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to pull together some data on how airplane travel affects global warming, as part of a broader project on transportation and climate change. My stunningly obvious conclusion: it’s complicated. Worse, different calculation methods yield wildly different results. Take, for instance, this brilliant chart (below) from the Stockholm […]