Climate Climate & Energy

Lights, Climate, Action

Schwarzenegger declares war on global warming “I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat, and the time for action is now.” With those words, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) yesterday defied Bush administration orthodoxy, announcing ambitious plans to reduce his state’s emissions of greenhouse gases. The Governator issued an […]

Japanese dress down to save 81 million gallons of oil in summer

What do you do if your country needs to meet targets under the Kyoto global warming protocol? You dress down.

Yup, the Japanese government is encouraging public workers to wear less in order to use less oil. Since many in Japan don dark suits in summer, they crank up the AC to maintain an average temperature of 77 degrees. Someone figured out that Japan could save 81 million gallons of oil in one summer by setting the temperature at 82. To make the warmer workplace more bearable, employees now have the okay to wear short sleeves and go sans tie.

However, one possible unintended consequence of this move is that shirt sales are up. I'm guessing that they are not organic.

Everything New Is Old Again

Wisconsin power-plant expansion could have long-term eco-consequences The fate of a Wisconsin coal-fired power plant could augur poorly for the environment, say its opponents. At issue is what does and doesn’t count as a “new” power-generating facility: Under the Clean Water Act, new facilities are subject to strict regulations on cleaning technology; an addition to […]

Salmon and Denial-Ah

Federal judge calls Bush admin’s salmon plan fishy In a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge James Redden yesterday ruled that the Bush administration’s salmon-protection plan for the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest is “contrary to law” because it doesn’t take into account how dams affect the fish’s chances of recovery. This is […]

Tar Wars

Canadian tar sands becoming top oil source, despite environmental harm With conventional oil reserves declining around the world, all eyes are turning to Canada, where tar sands in the north contain 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — almost in the neighborhood of Saudi Arabia’s 262 billion and far more than the Arctic Refuge’s […]

Pick a Little, Talk a Little

Few new ideas emerge from latest U.N. climate meetings What comes after Kyoto? That was the focus of a 190-nation, two-day seminar convened by the U.N. this week in Bonn, Germany, the first in what’s likely to be a gazillion-step process of figuring out what sort of climate-change treaty should pick up where the Kyoto […]

Everyone Knows It’s Windy

Argentine town may be model for producing hydrogen from wind The people of Pico Truncado in southern Argentina know the power of the wind that whips through their open land; it rips flags to shreds, dumps dust on clothing, and musses hair. But it also provides more than half of the town’s electricity and could […]

Power Ploy

California flirts with high-tech electricity meters, new pricing scheme California, ever the leader in innovative greenish programs, is planning yet another experiment, this time involving electricity use and pricing. With up to 15 million high-tech meters, at a cost of around $3.6 billion, three California utilities plan to meticulously track consumers’ minute-by-minute energy usage (something […]

They’re Just Not That Into You

Low Northwest salmon run confounds fishers, closes fisheries Conservationists, salmon enthusiasts, and fisheries managers along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest are wondering, Is it something we said? They’ve been stood up by thousands of chinook salmon that were expected to swim up the river to spawn this season, but never arrived. Original projections […]

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Climate scientists grow more concerned as Rome burns, Nero fiddles In most fields of science, lay opinion tends to be more alarmist than scientific opinion, says Carbon Mitigation Initiative codirector Robert Socolow. “But, in the climate case, the experts — the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice […]