Climate Energy
All Stories
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Micronesia challenges Europe’s dirty energy
The Czech Republic’s biggest polluter, the Prunéřov power station.Photo: Felix OThe Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), an island nation scattered across the Pacific north of New Guinea, has already had to confront the tides of climate change, which have eaten away at its coasts and left its food and water security in shambles. When leaders […]
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In Chicago, coal is the real crime
Greenpeace activists climbed the smokestack at the Fisk coal plant.Photo: GreenpeaceA sad fact of living in an American city like Chicago is that every time we open a newspaper or switch on the local news, we hear of some senseless, tragic crime that has claimed an innocent life. We become outraged, and we demand justice […]
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Denmark calls in armed commandos to fend off Greenpeace
Hippies near an oil rig! Send in the SWAT team! The Guardian is reporting that armed Danish commandos have been helicoptered onto an oil rig off Greenland, out of fears that Greenpeace activists will interfere with the rig’s deepwater drilling. Apparently Greenpeace has sent two ships to monitor the rig, owned by Scottish company Cairn […]
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Japan to mandate solar panels on all new buildings
What do you do if your country depended on nuke plants for energy, but is now too freaked out about nuclear disaster to trust them anymore? You harness the awesome nuclear power OF THE SUN! At least that’s the plan of Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan, who announced an energy policy that may require all […]
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Authorities finally admit that all three reactors at Fukushima melted down
It's official: All of Fukushima's working reactors saw drops in their water levels sufficient to melt their radioactive cores. (Experts have been telling us this for months, but Japanese power company TEPCO wouldn’t acknowledge it.) The only way the self-immolation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex could get any worse would be a large […]
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Pippa Middleton an ass … et at her ex’s geothermal energy firm
Everyone's favorite bridesmaid Pippa Middleton likes hot, wet … underground energy sources. The younger sister of the newly crowned Princess of Wales just took a job at ex-boyfriend's geothermal energy firm, which is looking to use underground stores of hot water to generate electricity. Pippa will be lobbying the British government for a licensing system […]
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Maybe fracked natural gas isn’t dirtier than coal, after all
The climate story on natural gas is gnarlier than ever. First there was a paper from Robert Howarth of Cornell claiming that natural gas from fracking is worse than coal, as far as net warming effect on the earth. Now the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has fired back, sort of, with […]
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Flashback: In 2003, Romney attacked coal jobs that ‘kill people’
Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, like his fellow GOP contenders, supports unlimited coal and oil production and opposes cap-and-trade markets to limit greenhouse pollution. Romney calls cap-and-trade a “radical feel-good” policy that would have “devastating results for people across the planet.” Last month, he told Fox News that the nation needed […]
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New, ‘hidden’ source of renewable energy fights for tax breaks
Waste heat: It's everywhere, and we're wasting it. (Hence the name.) Giant industrial processes throw off enormous amounts of the stuff, all of it not quite hot enough to be usable in conventional power generation. That's where the waste heat industry comes in. Using liquids that boil at temperatures significantly lower than water, they've created […]
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L.A. Times: Obama is throwing ‘the environment and public health under a bus’ to get reelected
Photo: The White HouseThe L.A. Times has delivered a blistering editorial that everybody in the White House should read: In the 2012 campaign, environmentalists don’t matter That’s the message President Obama is sending as the administration caters to smokestack and other industries. Ouch. Here’s the whole thing: Shortly after his party’s “shellacking” in the midterm […]