Natural gas utilities are no friends of Big Coal

In the fight against coal, crucial support may come from another fossil fuel: natural gas. A price on carbon emissions,...

Prince Charles, Richard Branson compare climate crisis to war

Prince Charles warned in a speech on Thursday that if a “courageous and revolutionary” approach to tackling climate change is...

Putting a bounty of paper towels to the test

Are your paper towels poisoning the planet? OK, I admit it: it’s not the sexiest product to test. Hard as...

City selected for largest U.S. smart grid project

When Xcel Energy announced a few days ago that it had selected Boulder, Colo. as "the nation's first fully integrated Smart Grid City," it represented a vitally important step toward creating a low-carbon energy network.

Xcel previously announced its intention to stage the largest and most comprehensive deployment of smart grid technologies in the U.S. ever, and now it says it has targeted Boulder for a several-year effort that will cost up to $100 million. The aim at a comprehensive system is precisely what makes this a breakthrough.

Smart grid technologies exhibit the classic network effect. Deployed individually, some can still have valuable benefits, as the personal computer did before the internet. To maximize benefits, however, they must be put together. Because this requires an overall systems transformation, and because such changes generally pose all sorts of chicken-and-egg challenges, the smart grid has been slow to catch on in the U.S. (France and Italy, who have more centrally managed electrical systems, have managed to advance farther.)

Arctic ice alarmingly scarce, say NOAA, NASA, NSIDC

Yes, I know you've all heard that we've had "record" refreezing of Arctic ice. Big shock there. We had record melting followed by a temporary cooling La Niña event. What those denier/delayer-1000 talking points don't tell you is that the refrozen ice is very thin and still at record low levels following the staggering ice loss this summer.

To set the record straight, on Wednesday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA had a teleconference to show the surprising and alarming new data from NASA's ICESat satellite, which revealed over the past year "the steepest yearly decline in perennial [i.e., old, thick] ice on record" (click to enlarge):

Could Canadian oil be the most destructive on earth?

Check out this new report from Environmental Defence Canada. The title sort of says it all: "Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth" (PDF).

I found the title a bit overheated at first, but take a look before you decide. The claim may be debatable, but it's also not mere hyperbole: the tar sands oil extraction very well could be the most destructive project on earth. In fact, it's already yielding catastrophic results for human health, not to mention for a vast swath of North America's ecology. (In any case, I've had the privilege of working on climate policy a bit with one of the authors, Matt Price, and I can attest that he's a smart guy, not prone to exaggeration.)

I won't summarize the study here, but just point out that among the many problems with tar sands oil, is that it can only be extracted and processed with very large energy inputs (which means huge carbon emissions):

Messing with nature more won’t fix the messes we’ve already made

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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[JR: Geo-engineering is to mitigation as chemotherapy is to diet & exercise. You can find some more specific reasons geo-engineering is unlikely to make sense at these posts: "Geo-engineering remains a bad idea" and "Geo-engineering is not the answer." I will be blogging again on this shortly. In the absence of strong mitigation efforts, geo-engineering will not stop catastrophic outcomes, like the end of most ocean life.]

Time magazine has declared geo-engineering one of "10 ideas that are changing the world."

"Messing with nature caused global warming," Time wrote. "Messing with it more might fix it."

What are they thinking?

On oil and the dollar, Bush and McCain acknowledge their own cluelessness

This post was originally published at the just-launched Think Progress Wonk Room, the new public policy rapid-response blog of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Brad Johnson, the climate specialist for the Wonk Room, was a writer for Hill Heat.

Skyrocketing gas prices are crippling the budgets of Americans, as Bush has newly discovered. But he doesn't have a solution. Nor does Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Bush's every response to energy problems is to drill for more oil and blame China. McCain has a more evolved position: his solution is to drill for more oil and build nuclear power plants, and blame China and terrorists. But neither will address a major culprit in the recent shocking spike in oil futures and gas prices -- the collapse of the American dollar due to a vicious circle of shortsighted right-wing economic policies.

Carbon taxes work when there’s substitutability and revenue is locked down for environmental goals

This is a guest post by Monica Prasad, who wrote an op-ed in Tuesday's New York Times called "On Carbon: Tax, Don't Spend." It elicited responses from David Roberts and Charles Komanoff.