renewables
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Dirty-money shills lie about renewables — here's the truth
Robert Bryce, who has made a career out of saying things that are popular with the petroleum industry, is a lying liar who lies, most recently in the pages of The New York Times. In a recent op-ed piece he claimed, basically, that natural gas is greener than renewables because he says so.
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The U.S. gets more power from renewables than from nuclear
A new report from the Energy Information Administration shows that in 2011, renewable power in the U.S. surpassed nuclear for the first time. In the first three months of the year, renewable energy plants -- including geothermal, biomass, wind, water, and solar -- were responsible for about 12 percent of the country's energy production, while nuclear produced only 2 percent.
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Germany Sets the Bar for a Green Energy Future
Today is a historic day in Germany and for green energy world wide. The German Parliament has made a precedent setting move – not only have they set a plan to phase out all nuclear by 2022, but the Parliament has committed to renewable energy like wind and solar as the replacement. The decision will […]
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Even Republicans and climate skeptics support fuel efficiency and clean energy
Regardless of how they felt about global warming -- from "alarmed" to "dismissive" -- nearly everyone in this 2009 survey supported increased fuel efficiency standards. Even the ones who dismissed the threat of climate change weren't very strongly opposed. What's more, 90 percent of people think clean energy should be a priority for the president, including 85 percent of Republicans. And more than 80 percent support increased funding of renewable energy research.
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Your tax dollars subsidize the sh*t out of coal
If you're a fan of a certain dried-leaves-boiled-in-water-related political party, you might believe that renewable energy is the recipient of huge amounts of government largesse, and that the first thing we should do once we get our guy or gal into office is slash all that wasteful spending.
But wait! It turns out coal gets way, way more subsidies for electricity generation.
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Is natural gas becoming a cover for the same old dirty fossil fuels industry?
One of the great ironies of the transition to renewable energy is that it's going to require a great deal of fossil fuels to build all those wind turbines, solar panels, and smart grids — because we simply don't have enough renewables already in the mix to bootstrap them up to the level we need […]
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Obama administration overseeing explosion in renewables on public land
The Bush administration issued more than 40,000 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands, but approved zero solar projects (even though they received 300 applications). In contrast, in 2010 alone the Bureau of Land Management approved 9 solar projects representing 3,682 megawatts of electric power, reports Climate Central. Why the difference? According to […]
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How to get to a fully renewable power system
How can we scale up the clean and phase out the dirty?What’s it going to take to substantially ramp up the amount of renewables in the electricity system? There are many nerdy discussions of that question on the interwebs, but lemme try to talk about it in reasonably non-nerdy language. There’s a certain amount of […]
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Japan to mandate solar panels on all new buildings
What do you do if your country depended on nuke plants for energy, but is now too freaked out about nuclear disaster to trust them anymore? You harness the awesome nuclear power OF THE SUN! At least that’s the plan of Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan, who announced an energy policy that may require all […]