Climate Technology

Forget China; largest rare earth element deposit is under this Nebraska town

Perhaps you've heard that China has a worldwide monopoly on rare earth elements, without which the high-tech and cleantech world -- electric cars, computers, cell phones, wind turbines, smart meters, advanced batteries, the whole enchilada -- would grind to a shiny, clanking halt.

But now, instead of relying on Chinese imports to keep the rare-earth economy humming, we can destroy our OWN local environment! A small town in Nebraska has volunteered to be turned into a giant open-pit mine in the name of powering the post-fossil-fuel revolution.

How to cover 100 percent of your car expenses by renting yours out

Getaround is a car-sharing service like ZipCar, except instead of borrowing the company's vehicles, you're borrowing your neighbors'.

Solar-powered oil field runs on sunshine, irony

Put on your coal-fired vegan anti-irony helmets, because Oman is building a solar-powered oil field. Not because it will make them feel good or help them tamp down their emissions (I mean, this is oil they're digging up) but because it makes economic sense.

Nissan wants you to power your house with your electric car

What if you could buy power at night, when it's cheap, and run your house off it by day, when it's expensive (and, in Japan at least, in short supply)? Nissan wants to give customers who buy its Nissan Leaf just this ability, by selling them special chargers for their electric cars that can be reversed to feed power back into a home.

China working on solar yaks

China is going to increase its solar capacity 10-fold in the next five years. Driving this solar great leap forward will be the "feed-in tariff" -- Chinese citizens who install solar panels will be paid 15 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce. Germany uses the same strategy, and as a result it has more solar power than any other country in the world.

Critical List: Wind power can be dangerous; the U.S. gets average marks on clean energy

Wind power's not entirely safe: A watchdog group warns that "one of these days, a turbine's going to fall on someone.”

The U.S. gets a C for renewable energy development from an alternative energy analyst.

Colorado's going to require fracking companies to disclose what's in their fracking fluid.

The natural gas boom is also creating demand for silica sand.

Representative Issa, please step away from the car deal

Everyone wins in Barack Obama's clean car agreement. Why did House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair Darrell Issa launch an investigation?

What's next for clean energy

If we play to America's strengths in innovation, entrepreneurship, and out-of-the-box thinking, we can make the most of clean energy.

LEDs can double as data transmitters, save even more energy

Here is one more totally awesome reason that we should be switching out incandescents for LED lightbulbs: a new technology means a single LED can transmit more data than a cellular tower. Prof. Harald Haas demonstrates in this TEDGlobal talk:

The lightbulb is flickering on and off too fast for the human eye to detect.

Making fuel-efficient cars will create hundreds of thousands of jobs

Jobs … who needs 'em? Not Congress, apparently. (The unemployed thank you for that debt deal! Or not.) But it turns out that the new fuel economy standards that President Obama announced last week will create jobs! Somewhere between about 500,000 and 600,000 of them by 2030, according to a report by Ceres, a group that works on sustainability issues: