Climate Technology

China pours money into smart grid technology

Cross-posted from Center for American Progress. There is no way to get around this fact — China aims to modernize its energy infrastructure at home and dominate clean energy technology markets abroad. At the 2011 Smart Grid World Forum in Beijing late last month, China’s State Grid Corporation announced plans to invest $250 billion in […]

Solar airship is most efficient way to fly, ever

How can you carry huge amounts of cargo thousands of miles with no fuel and no infrastructure? By combining an airship with an airplane, of course. The resulting wing-shaped blimp requires less helium than a conventional dirigible, but has a shorter takeoff than an airplane. Hybrid Air Vehicles has been proposing this for years, but upstart […]

Why are all the ‘most efficient states’ blue states?

    This year's list of the top 10 most energy-efficient states looks an awful lot like the map of red and blue states from the 2008 election. (Data were compiled by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.) We're not sure why. Got an opinion? Share it in the comments.

Solyndra, schmolyndra: The Obama administration’s hit rate is better than the private market’s

Making loans is a tricky business — sometimes you bet on the wrong horse. For example, there's the Obama administration, which doled out 1.4 percent of its Recovery Act cleantech investments to failed solar company Solyndra, in a move that everyone and their uncle is now calling a giant embarrassment. And then there's private venture […]

Who you gonna call? GrowthBusters! [VIDEO]

The new documentary "GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth" explores why our economy and footprint and population can't keep on expanding forever.

Electric vehicles improve fuel economy even if people don’t buy them

The first version of a radical new technology always gets off to a slow start -- remember what they said about the first iPhone? -- and so it is with the all-electric Nissan Leaf and plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt. Yet both vehicles are having an unexpected effect on their makers' bottom line. By getting people into the showroom, they’re helping to move other fuel efficient vehicles.

California adopts nation's first state cap-and-trade program

In what the L.A. Times calls "landmark" legislation, on Thursday California became the first state in the nation to adopt a classic cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cap-and-trade is the centerpiece of AB 32, California's historic climate change law that mandates a reduction in carbon pollution to 1990 levels by 2020. Beginning in 2013 the state's largest carbon emitters will be required to meet the caps or buy credits if they cannot.

Critical List: Climate change is happening (no, really!); the gas industry has some weird ideas

A Berkeley scientist who was once critical of climate science did an independent study that confirmed that climate change is happening and that common claims from skeptics are totally spurious. Skeptics are still skeptical.

Three-quarters of Americans think that the government should push harder on developing clean energy.

Shocker: The government also invested in electric cars and some of them were not perfect, i.e., THIS IS THE NEXT SOLYNDRA.

Natural gas companies don't understand why the EPA would want to make rules about fracking wastewater disposal: "We'll do it in a responsible way! Well, at least, we do now, after the New York Times revealed that we've just been dumping it into a river! But we'll do better! Honest!"

Politico doesn’t quite get it: The real problem with Solyndra media coverage

Media coverage of the Solyndra bankruptcy has been driven by conservatives, but the bigger problem is that it has completely lost touch with the real world.

Quantum levitation: Probably not the secret to hover-trains, but still amazing

A few places around the internet are calling this phenomenon — quantum levitation — the first step to magical hover-trains. This is probably not true, according to my physics source (it's my husband). Maglev trains use superconducting magnets, but that's just a type of electromagnet — it has nothing to do with the Meissner effect, […]