renewable energy

Is biodiesel the fuel of the future?

The Granola Ayatollah of Canola, aka Charris Ford, slides behind the wheel of his 1980 International Scout truck and turns the key. The truck burbles to life and off we go, cruising down the gravel roads that divide the aspen groves of southwestern Colorado’s Horsefly Mesa. It would be just a standard evening joyride, except […]

When it comes to renewable energy, the DOE is DOA

The question isn’t whether the Bush administration is in bed with the old-school energy industry; most of us have pretty much accepted that Big Oil and King Coal are the current sexy interns in the White House. Nor is the question whether we should be bracing for another oil shock; given the Iraqi oil boycott […]

The Little Solar Station That Could

The Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear power plant at Washington state’s Hanford nuclear reservation, sits just one mile from the White Bluffs Solar Station. For the past three weeks, Energy Northwest, the Pacific Northwest’s nuclear power producer, has been generating a tiny amount of electricity from solar panels at White Bluffs and selling it to […]

In the Andes Mountains, the pace of climate change is far from glacial

Even 16,500 feet in the air, perched on the steep slope of a volcano in Ecuador, French glaciologist Bernard Francou moves gracefully. Hopping among ice blocks and jagged rock debris, he stops suddenly before a boulder with blue letters painted on its surface. The thinker: Bernard Francou. Photo: Bernard Pouyaud, Ecuador Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia […]

A breakdown of the renewables vote in the Senate

One day after declining to support tougher fuel-efficiency standards, the Senate yesterday voted down a measure that would have required 20 percent of the nation’s electricity to be produced from wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources by 2020. Currently, less than 2 percent of U.S. electricity comes from renewable resources. The measure that could […]

Behind the scenes at the Bush administration's renewable energy summit

Ever since the White House declared energy independence a matter of national security, some unlikely evangelists in the Bush administration have been belting out the clean energy gospel. Case in point: Last week, Gale Norton presided over the first national renewable energy summit in history, co-hosted by the Departments of Interior and Energy. Gale Norton. […]

Domestic oil and gas is not the ticket to U.S. energy security

America’s fragile domestic infrastructure threatens her energy security at least as much as dependence on oil from the Middle East. Replacing oil from that region with even more vulnerable domestic systems would therefore decrease energy security. Stranger than science fiction. Extraordinarily concentrated energy flows invite and reward devastating attack. In our 1982 Pentagon study Brittle […]

McTraffic Jam

The Arctic Refuge could become Bush's gays-in-the-military

California’s energy crisis has become a national Rorschach test, saying more about the viewer than about the ink blot. President Bush is a special case: He looks at the deregulation crisis and sees the need to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Caribou-hoo-hoo. Photo: USFWS. Of course, given the number of oil […]