Climate Climate & Energy

Greenwashing coal with platitudes

In the same vein as the half-pint shill with a skateboard who's "stoked" about how clean coal is, this greenwash site for Peabody Coal tries to appeal to the bumpersticker platitude crowd in its latest ad:

ENERGY FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Flip a switch.
Play a tune.
Warm your home.
Fuel your car.
Yeah ... coal can do that.

Another One Fights the Must

Canada is totally over the Kyoto Protocol O, Canada. What are we going to do with you? Besides invade when oil gets too expensive, we mean. Canuck greenhouse-gas emissions are 35 percent above Kyoto targets, and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose has declared that to meet them, Canada would have to cease using all trains, planes, […]

Oops

Oil leaks all over everything Oil, oil everywhere! And not in a good way. In its dubiously named Sustainability Report, oil behemoth Royal Dutch Shell reports that oil spills at its facilities rose 50 percent from 2004 to 2005. Hurricane damage was responsible for a goodly portion of the spillage, and sabotage of a major […]

Far From the Madding Cloud

Pollutants contribute to Arctic warming some more The Arctic climate is already sensitive to global warming; now it turns out human pollutants are kicking it — or rather, warming it more — while it’s down. According to a new study in Nature, particulate pollution (mostly from cities in Europe) changes the size and number of […]

Countries May Have Shifted During Flight

China builds new airports; still not as pollutey as U.S. China plans to build 48 new airports in the next five years, spending $17.5 billion on construction and continuing expansion of existing hubs. The country is already the premier buyer of Boeing and Airbus planes, and has vowed to buy 100 planes every year until […]

The military-industrial complex wins again

Theoretically, the oil shale in the American West could provide enough oil to power the world, Saudi-free, for decades or more. The problem is that while oil shale is a hydrocarbon, it's not a terribly attractive one. Massive amounts of energy must be used to extract useful fuel, making it a loser in terms of economics and energy balance.

Fortunately, Raytheon (makers of the missiles and radars used by the USAF) is there to save the day, via The Energy Blog:

Radio frequency (RF) energy combined with critical fluid (CF) technology shows promise for efficiently extracting oil from shale. Historically, the lack of an economical and environmentally friendly way for extracting oil from shale has kept it from being a significant energy source.

"Raytheon is an expert in RF technology," said Lee Silvestre, director of Mission Innovation at Raytheon IDS. "What makes this effort a breakthrough is that similar RF technology that we have been applying in core defense products -- radars for tracking and guidance systems -- has demonstrated applications in the energy crisis."

So good to see a mom-and-pop operation like Raytheon helping the country -- nay, the planet! -- through its environmental crisis. After all, I'm sure oil-shale harvesting will be at least as efficient as, say, the tar sands.

The military industrial complex: Fueling the ... military industrial complex since 1945!

Corrode to Perdition

BP closes two more North Slope pipelines Oil giant — oops, beyond oil giant — BP is shutting down two more of its pipelines on Alaska’s North Slope, at the expense of 22,000 barrels of crude (worth some $1.5 million) a day. Neither pipe had leaked yet, but BP officials have been monitoring serious corrosion […]

Village of the Dammed

China nears completion of massive Three Gorges Dam, plots more dam-building Construction of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam — the Three Gorges Dam in China — may be completed as soon as May 20, nine months ahead of schedule. The $22 billion dam on the Yangtze River will eventually flood the homes of some 1.3 […]

Who Can Plame Them?

U.S. leaks IPCC report confirming climate change is happening A confidential draft of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been posted on the internet by U.S. officials, months before its scheduled publish date. The posting of the draft, which expresses increased confidence that global warming is human-caused and likely to […]

Rhymes With Blagojevich

Mercury emissions from power plants on the rise in the U.S. Mercury emissions in the U.S. fell by nearly 2 percent between 2003 and 2004, according to newly released federal data, but that small bit of good news masks a troubling trend. Mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were actually up 4 percent over the […]