Climate Technology

The world's greenest car

Berkeley, Calif. news site Berkeleyside polled readers about what kind of car best embodies that famously granola town. The Volvo station wagon won out, but this shot by reader Ed probably better encompasses Berkeley's green leanings.

The military's historic embrace of smart energy

The U.S. military's embrace of energy efficiency and renewable energy is going to be one of the great stories of the coming decade.

Scientists build machine to suck carbon from the air

This machine sucks carbon out of the air like a Ghostbusters beam snarfing up ectoplasm. The idea is that if we can build millions of these babies, and find a good place to stick the carbon they capture, we can start to bring down Earth's already-dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

It's not just the U.S. — China is also eating Germany's solar lunch

Germany has more installed solar capacity than any other country on the planet, despite having a population of only 80 million people. You'd think that would be enough to drive a market for domestic solar production, but only if you lived under a globalization-proof rock and ate steaming bowls of naivete for breakfast.

Critical List: #realtalk from Clinton on climate; a DIY electric car

“We look like a joke, right?” — President Bill Clinton, on the ridiculousness that is America’s climate-denying Republican candidates.

Obama is at least TRYING to cut coal, oil, and gas subsidies with his deficit reduction proposal.

Your commute could give you a heart attack. Not in some stress-related indirect way. The fumes from the cars increase the risk of your heart bottoming out.

These guys are DIYing an electric car. It’s awesome.

Energy genius wins MacArthur grant

Shwetak Patel is revolutionizing home energy use, and people are noticing. Patel was just awarded a MacArthur Fellowship -- affectionately known as a "genius award" -- for his work creating user-friendly ways for people to monitor and control their utilities consumption. In other words, this is what certified energy genius looks like.

Solyndra was collateral damage in a trade war with China

Solar-panel installations are booming in the U.S. even as domestic solar companies are struggling, thanks to China's policy of shoveling money into its solar industry.

Wall Street Journal embraces peak oil denialism

Daniel Yergin is to peak oil and limits to growth what Richard Lindzen, Anthony Watts, Christopher Monckton, the Heartland Institute and Exxon Mobil are to climate change. That is, Yergin's entire reason for being in the public eye is his rejection of the possible arrival of this calamity.

So of course it's perfectly logical that the Wall Street Journal, long a bastion of climate change denial, would give Yergin a stage on which to spew his unique brand of half-truths.

Protesters in China attack solar panel plant over pollution

Solar power may be the clean energy solution we're all waiting for, but only as long as it's constructed in an environmentally responsible manner. Five hundred protesters in China besieged a solar-panel manufacturing plant in the city of Haining, after it dumped massive amounts of fluoride into a nearby river, killing fish and livestock.

Canadian geothermal could produce a million times as much electricity as the country needs

The federal Geological Survey of Canada says that the total available geothermal resource in that country could produce a million times as much electricity as the entire country uses, or well more than enough to light up all of planet earth many times over.