Energy

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 […]

David Roberts Energy

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 […]

John Farrell Energy

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 […]

Gar Lipow Energy

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 […]

Brad Johnson Energy

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 […]

Jess Zimmerman Energy

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 […]

Tom Engelhardt Energy

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 […]

John Farrell Energy

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 […]

Christopher Mims Energy

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 […]