energy policy
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Navy Secretary says getting off fossil fuels is just like ditching sail power
Ray Mabus, Secretary of the U.S. Navy, has a refreshing historical perspective on the Navy's efforts to end its dependence on our increasingly expensive and environmentally destructive supplies of oil. From a speech he recently gave at the National Clean Energy Summit 4.0:
In the 1850s, we went from sail to coal. In the early 19th century, we went from coal to oil, and in the 1950s, we pioneered nuclear.
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Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Yergin, and the elite disdain for clean energy deployment
In the New York Times Book Review, Fareed Zakaria has a review of Daniel Yergin's new book, "The Quest," that reads like a capsule summary of current elite conventional wisdom on energy.
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Solyndra shows the government is doing its job, for once
Solyndra's failure isn’t an embarrassment for the government, says Joe Nocera in The New York Times. In fact, it’s exactly what we should expect from a government program designed to fund risky, early-stage technologies that wouldn't otherwise find traction among private-sector funders of research and development. If there were no Solyndras in this world, says Nocera, it would mean government was funding precisely the wrong kind of breakthrough energy research.
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Republicans pursued clean energy loans, too — and good for them!
The GOP now decries energy loans that they begged for a few years ago. This is hypocrisy, but remember that pursuing such loans is a good thing.
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Reinventing fire: five ways to save our energy-hogging economy
A new report reminds us where we are today in terms of energy consumption, and offers an ambitious vision for a prosperous clean-energy future.
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Switching from coal to natural gas would accelerate climate change, say scientists
Here is a terrifying, crazy-making truth: Getting off coal will accelerate climate change, at least in the short term.
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How Obama kinda completely missed the boat in his jobs speech
Let's you and me sit down and have some RealTalk™ for a minute: President Obama's jobs speech last night was about as good as it could get -- in the absence of any mention of the core driver of our ongoing global economic recession, which, need I remind you, is probably going to go double-dip.
Here's what he left out, neatly described in a hip, watchable video produced by the folks at the Post Carbon Institute.
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China to build 50+ nuclear reactors based on unsafe 60's tech, says Wikileaks
"China is currently in the process of building as many as 50 to 60 new nuclear plants by 2020; the vast majority will be the CPR-1000, a copy of 60's era Westinghouse technology that can be built cheaply and quickly and with the majority of parts sourced from Chinese manufacturers," says this cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
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Brit gives NIMBYists the tongue-lashing they deserve
Writing in the Times (of New York, not London), Roger Cohen points out that even though 82 percent of Brits are in favor of wind power, only one in three on-shore projects is ever built, owing to "Not in My Back Yard" attitudes. Apparently Her Majesty’s citizens are all for wind power as long as it happens in one of the colonies. (“We still have colonies, right?”)