Climate Energy
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What would happen if Americans had a say in how their tax money is spent?
Lemme tell you …How would America change if taxpayers were allowed to specify how their tax money were spent? That fascinating question (no, really, it’s fascinating!) is explored in a piece by Cait Lamberton in the latest issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Side note: if you don’t read Democracy, you really should bookmark […]
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If you like solar, tell your utility to publish this map
Distributed energy generation (like solar) brings unique and valuable benefits to the electric grid. But capturing those benefits means solar and other renewable energy developers must find the best places to plug in to the grid, e.g. where demand is high or infrastructure is stressed. The cost to connect distributed generation may also be lower […]
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The real cost of coal: even higher than we think
Every now and then I see studies that try to estimate the real cost of fossil fuels, what we don’t pay up front. Normally they contain numbers that seem unbelievably low to me, like this one from the National Academy of Sciences that was reported on Grist. We blow the tops off mountains, kill miners quickly in […]
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Power Shift 2011: Rebuilding the Gulf from the BP oilpocalypse
BP got a big tax refund for cleaning up its own mess.Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. More than 100 youth and community members from the Gulf Coast are travelling to Washington D.C. on Friday for Power Shift 2011 to deliver a unified message: The BP oil disaster is not over. One year after the Deepwater […]
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Half-naked college students protest coal
Oh, college students.They'll use just about anything as an excuse to take off their clothes. We'll give them this one, though, because this bunch of barely-legals is stripping down for a good cause: Raising awareness about the harm coal mining — and coal-powered universities — can do to the environment. The anti-coal undies were designed […]
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The Fukushima nuclear disaster just keeps getting messier and scarier
An anti-nuclear protestor in Japan gets creative.Photo: Matthias LambrechtThis post was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Last Monday, Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, defended the Japanese government’s response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, insisting that the plant complex is in “a stable situation, relatively speaking.” That’s somewhat […]
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Wind farm sizes suggest bigger is no better
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Have wind developers hit a financial sweet spot above which more turbines results in disproportionate land acquisition and lease costs? Are crane and construction economies of scale no greater? Are NIMBY concerns mitigated with a smaller […]
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America has way more ‘disturbed’ land for wind power than it needs, says report
Yes, renewable energy is more living-thing-friendly than fossil fuels, but given a choice, animals would probably prefer that we take our damn opposable thumbs and go back to living in caves. Wind turbines don't sully a hilltop the same way mountaintop-removal mining would, but they do have a footprint. That's why a new study published […]
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Quote of the day: Obama on America’s future
"A 70% cut to clean energy. A 25% cut in education. A 30% cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That's what they're proposing. These aren't the kind of cuts you make when you're trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings […]
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Meet the woman leading the charge to green America’s schools
Recently I was at a climate conference dominated by Baby Boomers, mostly white men, droning on about the nigh-insurmountable challenges of climate change and laying out their ponderous academic theories for how to change things. In other words, a typical climate conference. Into this dolorous atmosphere came something different: a young woman, bright-eyed and quick-witted, […]
