Climate Climate & Energy

The world’s expert on recycled energy discusses … recycled energy

All across the nation, factories and power plants are wasting energy — lots and lots of it. If that energy could be captured and put to good use, greenhouse gas emissions could be substantially reduced, at a profit. Thomas Casten has been proclaiming this good news for almost 30 years now. Not only that, he’s […]

Geez, All We Got Was Karl Rove’s Resignation

Governments ruffled by climate kerfuffles in England, Australia A couple of government climate kerfuffles have broken out: In Britain, a leaked briefing paper says the country won’t meet a European Union target of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, and suggests lobbying other nations for a more flexible interpretation of the goal or using “statistical […]

Oopsy Daisy

Alaskan study says 2 million gallons of oil, seawater spilled over 10 years Did you hear about the 2-million-gallon spill in the Alaskan tundra? No, you didn’t, because it happened slowly, from different sources, over the course of 10 years. A study by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation says spills on the North Slope […]

Two crazy environmental stories via podcast

I've been catching up on a backlog of podcasts this week (I haven't used my iPod in weeks; in New York City you almost feel alien if you walk the streets without cables in your ears). From one of my favorites, the NPR Environment podcast, two surprising stories.

The first is from their excellent Climate Connections series, created in conjunction with National Geographic. Who knew that Nigeria's natural gas flares are so big they can be viewed from space? As horrifying as it sounds, apparently, "every year, millions of dollars are literally going up in smoke in Nigeria," as oil-drilling companies burn off unwanted natural gas produced during crude- oil extraction.

What makes this practice so egregious, beyond the fact that it contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other activity south of the Sahara, and beyond the fact that the noxious fumes are destroying the respiratory health of Nigeria's people and dirtying their drinking water, is that the very people who live next to these perennial blow torches often don't have electricity themselves.

Writing about Mooney, writing about storms

I reviewed Chris Mooney’s new book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, for The American Prospect, and it’s up today. Gristmiller Kit Stolz reviewed it here a while ago, but uh, mine is … longer. Anyway, the book is good, though not the galvanizing polemic that made his first book, The […]

They didn’t like being called ‘costumed twits’

Yesterday I took some potshots at the Greenpeace protestors following Rep. John Dingell around. Chris Miller, director of Greenpeace US’s global warming campaign, contacted me to ask if he could post a response. Of course I said yes. Again, for those who seem to miss this: this post is not by me, David Roberts. It […]

Not any more

Nope. This is actually pretty nifty, if you’re a solar geek. This company, G24i, has been working for a long while to come up with solar cells covered in a dye that, when struck by light, discharges an electron, which is immediately captured by a neighboring crystal of titanium oxide. It’s unlikely it will scale […]

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They’re not going to save us

Oh well, it was a nice thought: A decade-long experiment led by Duke University scientists indicates that trees provide little help in offsetting increased levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Note to the hordes of indignant commenters lunging for the CAPS LOCK key: this does not mean trees are worthless. Trees do many wonderful […]

Except that we still have to wait another 10 years

The German government on Wednesday cleared the way -- finally -- to phase out the mining of hard coal in Germany.

As explained by this Associated Press article in the International Herald Tribune, the heavily subsidized German hard coal industry still employs about 33,000 people in eight underground mines. The plan is to phase out hard-coal mining starting in 2009, and for miners to receive compensation if they are laid off prematurely.

Hard-coal mining "has no future" in Germany, declared Economy Minister Michael Glos. "A great, long era is coming to an end in a socially responsible way."