Climate Energy

Why railroads care about coal exports

U.S. rail haul more coal than they do any other commodity. It's no wonder, then, that with domestic coal use declining, railways support coal exports.

Forecast for 2012: More sun and wind

2011 saw solar and wind powering more homes and businesses than ever before, and 2012 is shaping up to be even better.

Scientist blames James Bond for lack of nuclear support

Anti-nuclear campaigners, why do you dislike nuclear power? Is it because of the risk of massive meltdowns? The unsolved issue of what to do with waste? The lack of realistic evacuation plans?

Or is it the influence of a James Bond movie you probably watched at least a couple times as a bored child -- Dr. No?

Chamber of Commerce pushes civilization-ending pollution agenda

In his annual address today, Tom Donohue, Chamber of Commerce president, advocated burning hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels.

Sunflowers show how to capture solar energy more efficiently

In design, biomimicry -- the idea that nature does design best -- is all the rage. So it must have been a head-slapping "duh" moment when solar-power designers sought inspiration from sunflowers -- a plant that has "sun" in its name, for goodness' sake! It turns out that sunflowers are really good at using the sun (NO WAY), and mimicking their structure can allow designers to seriously reduce the size of concentrating solar power farms.

Oil industry gives $12 million to pro-Keystone legislators

An independent research group has analyzed oil industry contributions to Congress, and figures that President Obama is staring down a $12 million barrel of political opposition on Keystone XL. Some of that is going out in huge chunks -- 16 Republican House members and one Democrat have received $100,000 or more in contributions from the oil lobby, and lo and behold, the representatives are all voting just the way their evil overlords would like them to. But the industry is also spreading the wealth around. A total of 118 House members list the oil and gas industry among their top 10 contributors, and most of them are toeing the line as well.

Update: An earlier version of this post had "anti-Keystone" in the headline because, I don't know, I'm an idiot? Anyway, PRO.

Dubai complements world’s tallest building with ginormous solar farm

The largest solar farm in the Middle East will be financed by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai. He was also a big promoter of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (the one Tom Cruise is climbing on in the video), so the man clearly has a taste for large projects. If you know what I mean.

The man whose algae could take over the world

If life is really a disaster movie in which humanity is wiped off the face of the earth, J. Craig Venter will probably be the hubristic genius who gets us there. The man sequenced the human genome in like three years, and now he's focused on the genetic possibilities of algae. The goal is to program those little cells to produce biofuels.

Here's his pitch, as told to Scientific American:

Everybody is looking for a naturally occurring alga that is going to be a miracle cell to save the world, and after a century of looking, people still haven’t found it. We hope we’re different. The [genetic] tools give us a new approach to being able to rewrite the genetic code and get cells to do what we want them to do.

Eek! Mutant algae!

New York State legislators get $1.3 million from gas industry

New York State is considering whether and how to move forward with hydrofracking in the state, and by TOTAL COINCIDENCE the natural gas industry has spent $1.3 million -- a fortune in state-level campaign finance -- in donations to the New York legislators who will decide its fate.

According to an analysis by Common Cause New York, most of the money went to candidates for state legislature. Republicans received more than twice as much as Democrats.

Operators fined $140k for surfing web instead of running nuke plant

Nine operators of the River Bend nuclear power plant near Baton Rouge, La., just landed their employer a $140,000 fine for surfing the web from the plant's control room, reports Mark Halper at SmartPlanet.