Climate Technology

Guitar Antihero 1: How Gibson Guitars made illegal logging a conservative cause célèbre

Republican leaders are bashing well-respected trade regs that protect American jobs. Behind the coup: Tea Party groups and Gibson Guitar.

Navy Secretary says getting off fossil fuels is just like ditching sail power

Ray Mabus, Secretary of the U.S. Navy, has a refreshing historical perspective on the Navy's efforts to end its dependence on our increasingly expensive and environmentally destructive supplies of oil. From a speech he recently gave at the National Clean Energy Summit 4.0:

In the 1850s, we went from sail to coal. In the early 19th century, we went from coal to oil, and in the 1950s, we pioneered nuclear.

Critical List: Energy Dept. picks more winners; natural gas boom comes to Ohio

The Department of Energy, always picking winners, you know? The first Quadrennial Technology Review, to be released today, favors technologies that could come into commercial use in 10 years — i.e. consumer goods you can spend money for. This could mean DOE favors EVs over new clean energy technologies.

This company, Renmatix, will probably make it under the wire, though. It says it has the right technology to make commercially viable biofuels from biomass and just opened a plant to forward development of the technique.

The natural gas boom comes to Ohio.

Although Beijing usually gets a bad rap on pollution, Central and South Asia are not great places to live if you like inhaling clean air, either.

Engineers: We have all the tech we need to cut carbon

Apparently the world's engineers are getting sick of being told that cutting emissions is an engineering problem. Eleven of the biggest engineering organizations have released a joint statement saying, in effect, "You want carbon cuts? We can give you carbon cuts. Just say the word, smart guy." 

We already have all the tech necessary to cut emissions 85 percent by 2050, say the engineers. What we don't have is support from governments -- laws that prioritize carbon reduction, and funding to put the technology into action.

Graph: The embarrassingly paltry sums government gives renewable energy

Click here for a larger version of this image.

Solyndra shows the government is doing its job, for once

Solyndra's failure isn’t an embarrassment for the government, says Joe Nocera in The New York Times. In fact, it’s exactly what we should expect from a government program designed to fund risky, early-stage technologies that wouldn't otherwise find traction among private-sector funders of research and development. If there were no Solyndras in this world, says Nocera, it would mean government was funding precisely the wrong kind of breakthrough energy research.

Teen's invention boosts solar panel output 40 percent

Nineteen-year-old Eden Full is going to be taking a few years off from her studies at Princeton. That's because she's been getting a ton of grants to finish developing her SunSaluter, a technology that allows solar panels to track the sun, boosting output by 40 percent.

Solar industry is strong like bull

Texas Republican says we should still invest in solar after Solyndra

Here's Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, explaining why the Solyndra collapse shouldn't end solar loan guarantees. Refreshing! Solyndra had "too little oversight," Barton says, but solar is still viable and other companies should get loans if there's a reasonable expectation that taxpayers won't get screwed.

Everybody but America is cuckoo for carbon capture

While the U.S. has largely given up on building functional carbon capture and storage projects linked to power plants, everyone else is all over it. Whatever your feelings about this technology, it's undeniable that it's one more "clean" energy effort we're falling behind on, reports EnergyBiz.