Climate Climate & Energy

Can Richard Simmons Solve Our Energy Woes?

Tom Turner reviews Transforming Electricity by Walt Patterson

Walt Patterson is a physicist by training, an entertaining and lucid writer (he seldom misses a chance at wordplay -- note the title of this book), a fan of jazz and baseball and real ale, and an incisive popularizer of important but complicated matters. And yes, he's my friend. Remind me to tell you some day about several hours we spent years ago in the bookstores on and near Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, scouring dusty shelves for out-of-print popular books on atomic energy, The Atom Is Your Friend and such.

Hot and Bothered

Amory Lovins Sees the Future and It Is Hydrogen

For 25 years, energy guru Amory Lovins has been seeing farther and farther into the energy future. He has been labeled a dreamer, but by now he’s accumulated enough of a record to qualify as an oracle. At a recent meeting of the National Hydrogen Association, he (with colleague Brett Williams of Rocky Mountain Institute) […]

A Mother's Day Emissions Proposal

The Great North American Carbon Sink — Maybe

“Aha! We knew it!” a number of conservative columnists have been crowing lately. “Greenhouse, schmeenhouse, go right on driving those sports utility vehicles.” The cause of their excitement is an article published in Science magazine, one of the most prestigious places a scientific article can be published, claiming that the North American continent is a […]

A review of 'Earth Odyssey' by Mark Hertsgaard

Will humans survive the environmental degradation we've loosed on the world, or will we drive ourselves to extinction alongside countless other species? Mark Hertsgaard sets forth to explore this question in his wide-ranging book Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, and while he does not arrive at a vision of humanity on the brink of extinction, he presents a sobering portrait of problems present and impending.

The Answer, My Friend, Is Funding in the Wind

The U.S. is putting up $1.5 million to export American energy-efficiency technology to China, Russia, Ukraine, and a number of Latin American countries. U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced the grant yesterday at an Earth Day news conference in New York, also noting that the Clinton administration later this year would launch a five-year plan […]