Climate Technology
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Hypnotic video of wind turbine being erected in under 7 minutes
Turns out assembling a 364-foot-high wind turbine is just like playing with an impossibly enormous Erector set. This 1.5 MW turbine went up in Boston, where it will save its owner $350,000 in electricity costs every year.
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Preoccupied: Grist readers sound off about the Wall Street protests
Photo: Eric WagnerA couple of weeks ago, we asked you all to send us your observations and insights on the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. (Then we asked again.) And man did you deliver. We received an avalanche of emails, comments, tweets, and posts on our Facebook page. Word came in from New York City, […]
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Molson Coors explains why it decided to give a crap about the environment
The problem with corporations trying to do the right thing is that even if they were actually being socially and environmentally responsible, who would know? I mean, everyone knows that it's written into our country's laws that corporations must be sociopaths who care about nothing beyond enriching themselves. So it's refreshing to see Eric Roston, […]
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Hybrid power plant turns wind directly into automotive fuel
Enertrag is a new hybrid power plant whose parent company invites you to "drive to [your] local petrol station and fill up with 50 litres of wind … !!!" Three exclamation points! Renewable energy has made Germans so adorable. Their website even has a picture of German chancellor Angela Merkel showing off a tank of […]
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Cool energy-storage projects popping up; expect a lot more
Tracking the politics of clean energy can be a surreal and dispiriting experience. D.C. is so swamped in fossil-fuel money, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and fossil-fuel-owned pols that the conventional wisdom is absurdly pessimistic about clean energy: It’s unreliable, it costs too much, it can never work, blah blah. Meanwhile, out in the real world, costs are […]
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From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Earth
Photo: Eric WagnerThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and […]
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Facebook is building a renewable-powered mini-town in the Arctic
Facebook is building a server farm in northern Sweden, on the edge of the Arctic circle. The average temperatures there are so cold that they won't need to use anything but the outside air to cool 600,000 square feet of servers. But even so, the server farm will use as much power as 16,000 homes. […]
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The Heritage Foundation is wrong in opposing all federal loans
Government loans create American jobs and help small businesses get off the ground.Cross-posted from Climate Progress. This year, hundreds of small businesses will expand operations with money borrowed from the government. Thousands of 18-year-olds will pay their freshman-year tuition with money borrowed from the government. Farmers will plant crops using money borrowed from the government. […]
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Solar and wave power solution: Fill the ocean with balls
Designer Phil Pauley wants to coat our oceans with floating solar cell-covered balls. Their buoyancy could also make them viable as a wave-power system. It's purely conceptual at this stage, and with good reason: Until recently, wave power hasn't fared well as an alternative energy. Anything that goes in the ocean is subject to immense […]
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Is the Keystone XL pipeline actually worse than the alternatives?
Believe it or not, intelligent, informed people who are passionate about preserving a livable climate disagree about whether or not the Keystone XL pipeline is a target worthy of environmental ire. Keystone XL has been called "game over for the climate" by none other than NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and Bill McKibben (full disclosure: […]