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  • Will Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s new mayor, deal with the city’s coal pollution problem?

    Will new Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel get tough on coal?Photo: Daniel X. O’NeillChicago has a major coal problem. The city’s Fisk and Crawford coal-fired power plants, which have been operating for nearly 100 years and were rebuilt more than 40 years ago, were grandfathered in under the 1970 Clean Air Act amendments. The assumption at […]

    Josh Nelson Energy

  • Booming U.S. coal exports forebode a coal-fired 21st century

    If you thought America didn't make anything anymore, you're wrong! We make disastrous, planet-killing levels of climate change. It's all a consequence of the record 100 million tons of coal we're going to export all over the world this year, much of it to Asia. Even as one out of 10 gigawatts of U.S. coal-fired […]

    Christopher Mims Energy

  • CoalCares responds to Peabody legal threat

    As you probably know, the Yes Lab (home of the Yes Men) recently put up a site called CoalCares.com, a parody suggesting that coal company Peabody is interested in doing something about the health impacts of coal on children. (How dare they!) Peabody responded, predictably, by threatening a lawsuit. Here’s the letter the Yes Lab […]

    David Roberts Energy

  • How community ownership can save wind power

    This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project.     Community ownership may provide the solution for increasing resistance to wind power in the United States. Wind power has expanded rapidly in recent years, but the new wind farms have a common characteristic: absentee ownership. These […]

    John Farrell Energy

  • Americans to Big Oil: We’ve got your number

    Skimmed oil from the Gulf is pumped into recovery trucks.Photo: BP AmericaCross-posted from the Center for American Progress. This post was coauthored by Valeri Vasquez, special assistant for energy policy at the Center for American Progress. The numbers don’t lie. Tax loopholes allow Big Oil companies to ratchet up their annual earnings at the expense […]

    Daniel J. Weiss Energy

  • The most danceable fracking explainer you’ll see today

    "My Water's On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song)" is "Why Does The Sun Shine?" for fracking. ("Your groundwater is a mass of incandescent gas …") It explains enough about hydraulic fracturing — what it's for, how it works, where it can go wrong, why your sink just went up in flames — for you to […]

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • Japan (shockingly!) gives up on further nuclear power

    Once irradiated, twice shy: Japan is giving up on plans for future nuclear reactors after the disaster at Fukushima. The country had planned to build 14 more reactors by 2030, aiming to provide 50 percent of its electricity supply with nuclear power. Now, those plans are off the table, says Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan. […]

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • A battle for the Earth’s last remaining frontier

    In the Arctic Ocean, Big Oil is taking bigger risks than ever before.Photo: U.S. Geological SurveyThere are clear signs that a new Arctic oil rush has begun. Earlier this month, Shell submitted plans to the U.S. government for new drilling in the icy waters off Alaska’s north coast, and now a Scottish company has won […]

    Philip Radford Energy

  • Peabody Coal’s new site is too awful to be believed, but some of you believed it anyway

    Hey, did you hear about Peabody Coal's unconscionable new site, Coalcares.org? They're offering free Dora the Explorer and Justin Bieber-branded inhalers to kids living near coal plants! They have a "Kidz Koal Korner" with these cartoon characters called "Puff" and "Ash," and they say clean energy will kill you, and they want to make kids […]

    Jess Zimmerman Energy

  • Breaking the link between energy consumption and economic growth

    Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. There are skeptics of energy efficiency who claim that, paradoxically, all the energy and money we have been saving due to energy efficiency, across all sectors of the economy, has actually caused us to increase our energy consumption. This “economy-wide rebound” theory is a startling, but ultimately unsupportable, […]

    Sierra Martinez Energy