Climate Climate & Energy

Funny safety joke

Have you heard the one about the Japanese nuclear reactor that caught fire and leaked radioactive waste into the ocean?

Using molten salt to store solar energy

We've gone round and round on various ways to store energy from intermittent suppliers like solar and wind before ...

The always excellent Robert Rapier has this interesting squib on using molten salt to store thermal energy from solar in his R-Squared Energy Blog.*

(While you're there you should check out his terrific posts on ethanol and biodiesel. He is in the interesting position of being a real advocate who can't ignore how oversold they are.)

In which I clear everything up

Over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a strangely heated debate on this site about carbon offsets. In this post, I’ll speculate about why the concept is so charged, and argue that it doesn’t warrant all the heat. And then I will leave the subject behind, at least for now. Start here: why is […]

Contrary to what you might have heard

A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists finds:

Increasing the average fuel economy of America’s new autos to 35 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2018 would save consumers $61 billion at the gas pump and increase U.S. employment by 241,000 jobs in the year 2020, including 23,900 in the auto industry ...

The study is available here.

According to the analysis, nearly $24 billion of the gasoline savings would become new revenue for automakers in 2020–paying for the improved technologies plus some profit ...

[P]utting fuel economy technology to work would also cut our oil addiction by 1.6 million barrels per day and reduce global warming pollution by more than 260 million metric tons, akin to taking nearly 40 million of today’s average cars and trucks off the road in 2020.

Second to Naan

A worried India takes steps toward national climate plan India — home to more than a billion people and a fast-expanding economy — is taking its first steps toward a climate-change plan. On Friday, at the kick-off meeting of the National Council on Climate Change, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave a preview of a “Green […]

Showing off sustainability slide shows from around the world

Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation (which was actually done in Keynote on a Mac) may be the most famous global-warming slide show, but it's one of probably millions. Scores of save-the-planet slide shows have been shown off in boardrooms and classrooms around the world. Here are some cooked up by people from around the globe.

Alas, the cute factor is conspicuously missing.

Edwardsian rhetoric

In this interview, John Edwards uses a line I’ve heard him use three or four times now, so it must be a stock part of his speeches: Our generation must be the one that says, "We must halt global warming." Um, no. Our generation must be the one that says, "Our generation must be the […]

Japan experiments with seaweed as biofuel

As birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol, Japan is one of the pioneering countries in climate change policy and research. In 1990, Japan pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 6 percent by 2012. One of their proposed stratagems for meeting this goal is to replace the 132 million gallons of gasoline that Japan car drivers use with a biofuel option.

It’s as bad as we thought

Don't miss this tidbit from Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona's Tuesday testimony before Congress:

He described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said.

"And I said to myself, 'I realize why I've been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don't understand the science,'" he said. "I was never invited back."

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Literally

The International Rivers Network has a new study out, “Before the Deluge: Coping with Floods in a Changing Climate,” which details the failures of flood control techniques like dams and levees and presents other options for areas that may face flooding from severe weather and rising shorelines. Turns out traditional flood control measures like embankments […]