renewable energy
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Critical List: 2011 was pretty darn warm; dams could exacerbate climate change
2011 will be the tenth or eleventh warmest year on record, depending on who you ask. All but one of the nine or ten warmer years were in the last decade. (The only exception is 1998.) The Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs is required to approve renewable energy projects on Native American-owned […]
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America’s energy future: iPads vs. typewriters with guns
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. As Americans transition their electricity system to the 21st century, they should ask this question: Does it make sense to pursue strategies such as accelerating the development of new high-voltage power lines that reinforce an outdated […]
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Renewables trump fossil fuels for first time ever
Last year investors poured $187 billion into electricity from renewable sources (wind, sun, biomass, etc.), versus $157 billion for fossil fuels, calculates Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “The progress of renewables has been nothing short of remarkable,” United Nations Environment Program Executive Secretary Achim Steiner said in an interview. “You have record investment in the midst of […]
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Renewables in the U.S.: Growing fast, but not fast enough
Last month, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released the “2010 Renewable Energy Data Book” [PDF], which is a cornucopia of charts, facts, and figures on energy use in the U.S. The top-line conclusion for climate hawks is familiar: Renewable energy is growing rapidly, but not rapidly enough; it remains a small fraction of overall […]
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Feed-in tariffs responsible for most renewable energy
Cross-posted from CleanTechnica. Feed-in tariffs are a comprehensive renewable energy policy responsible for 64 percent of the world’s wind power and almost 90 percent of the world’s solar power (see charts below). With simplified grid connections, long-term contracts, and attractive prices for development, that’s policy that works. Image: David Jacobs Image: David Jacobs The basic […]
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Google drops renewable energy program
Google announced yesterday that it's trashing its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal program, or or RE<C, as part of its "spring cleaning." (Ugh, Californians. It is nothing like spring right now.) This move puts RE<C in the same category as Google Wave, which was useless from the first moment it existed and was also offed […]
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Think Walmart uses 100% clean energy? Try 2%
Walmart is moving like a tortoise toward its clean-energy goal.Context is critical to understanding Walmart’s sustainability initiatives and their impact on the retailer’s overall environmental footprint. But context has been sorely absent in the news media’s coverage of Walmart’s green efforts. Even within the environmental community, conversations about Walmart tend to miss the big picture. […]
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Surprise! Koch-funded anti-Solyndra ad is ‘mostly false’
Here's an anti-Solyndra ad put out by Americans For Prosperity. It is wrong. And it's been viewed 1 million times on YouTube alone, not to mention millions more on television. Which just goes to show you that if you give the people what they want, they will eat it up like delicious candied bacon, because […]
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NY Times needs a time out
I recently turned 401. But I didn’t start feeling old until this weekend — because that’s when I started yelling at newspapers2. On Saturday, the New York Times published a lurid, sneering, over-the-top piece on renewable energy that was riddled with errors and really missed the forest for the trees. We’ve prepared a document rebutting […]
