Climate Technology

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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 […]

    David Roberts Technology

  • 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 […]

    Chip Ward Technology

  • 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. […]

    Jess Zimmerman Technology

  • 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. […]

    Richard W. Caperton Technology

  • 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 […]

    Christopher Mims Technology

  • 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: […]

    Christopher Mims Technology

  • Direct subsidies to fossil fuels are the tip of the (melting) iceberg

    In recent years, energy subsidies have risen to become a first-tier political issue. Lots of folks are thinking and talking about them, which is absolutely a Good Thing. However, the discussion has remained narrow and legalistic in a way that obscures some larger realities. The usual question that gets asked is, who gets more direct […]

    David Roberts Technology

  • New ‘fish-friendly’ turbine means way more hydro power

    Every year, the U.S. forgoes 8,500 megawatts of electricity because operating our hydro power facilities at full capacity would turn an unacceptable number of migratory fish into Li'l Lisa Slurry. (That's the equivalent of almost nine nuclear reactors' worth of lost baseload power.) So scientists and utilities are understandably pumped about the Alden Fish-Friendly Turbine, […]

    Christopher Mims Technology

  • Investors representing $20 trillion get behind climate change prevention

    It's sort of a no-brainer to realize that we need to invest in clean energy technology and get governments to institute policies that support those investments. Greens have been saying that for ages. But greens, for the most part, do not represent $20 trillion in assets. So when people who do wield that amount of […]

    Jess Zimmerman Technology

  • Wind turbine with Inspector Gadget arms makes twice the power

    A simple new idea in wind turbines could increase their power production by 100 percent over the course of a year, and even make it possible to put turbines in places where they were uneconomical before. By giving turbines blades that extend — longer for lower speed winds, shorter for faster winds —  researcher Rajnish […]

    Christopher Mims Technology