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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 […]

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • 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 […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • 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 […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • 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 […]

    Sarah Laskow Energy

  • 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 […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • 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 […]

    Stephen Lacey Energy

  • 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 […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • 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 […]

    Joseph Romm Energy

  • Denmark’s government throws down the gauntlet: 100 percent renewables by 2050

    Lots of people talk about the possibility of getting to 100 percent renewables by such and such a date — if every one of these reports came true, we'd be exporting surplus wind power to the asteroid belt by now. But few countries are actually doing it. Denmark is one. And Denmark would like you […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • Dem Disease claims another victim

    Beware Dem Disease.Joseph Aldy worked for a while as a top energy aide in Obama’s White House. Apparently, while he was there he caught Dem Disease. Dem Disease is an affliction that causes sufferers to prioritize being viewed as reasonable over securing reasonable policy. The primary symptom is a Tourette’s-like inability to keep from revealing […]

    David Roberts Energy