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Apollo and BlueGreen Alliance merge — a smart move at a time of clean-energy trouble
Last week, the Apollo Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance, two of the most important national nonprofits supporting clean energy development and good jobs, announced that as of July 1, they would merge. The much larger Minneapolis-based BlueGreen Alliance, a five-year-old collaboration of big green groups and unions, will become the parent of San Francisco-based Apollo, which […]
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Buildings that make more energy than they use gain steam
If every building made more energy than it uses, would all the world's power plants pack up and go home? Maybe education would be fully funded and the military would be forced to have a bake sale! But really: There is a building in Bellenberg, Germany that produces more energy than it consumes, mostly by […]
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How the ‘Arab Spring’ makes massive solar in North Africa more likely
Desertec is a massive project to to build solar thermal plants in the deserts of North Africa — you know, the same North Africa that had all the revolutions just now. But proponents are saying there’s no reason to put the project on hold just because of political unrest. In fact, they say, the economic […]
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Greener cars and fuel mean fewer deaths tied to vehicle emissions
Cars idling in traffic lead to more than 2,200 premature deaths each year, according to a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health. But lower vehicle emissions and cleaner fuels have been driving down that number for past decade, and the number of deaths will continue to decrease until about 2025, the study […]
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Critical List: Christie ditches climate initiative; France opens huge solar farm
New Jersey governor Chris Christie has jumped ship from a regional greenhouse gas program, because "it's a failure." The owners of the Fukushima nuclear plant provided regulators with only a one-page memo on its tsunami and earthquake preparedness. One page. A decade ago. In Japan, the country that invented the word “tsunami.” Green tech companies […]
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Even the Swiss hate nuclear now
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it seems nobody can stay neutral on nuclear power, not even Switzerland. The country has abandoned plans for new nuclear reactors, and while the five existing reactors will be allowed to keep operating, they won't be replaced. Nuclear in Switzerland will be entirely phased out by 2034, and […]
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How to get to a fully renewable power system
How can we scale up the clean and phase out the dirty?What’s it going to take to substantially ramp up the amount of renewables in the electricity system? There are many nerdy discussions of that question on the interwebs, but lemme try to talk about it in reasonably non-nerdy language. There’s a certain amount of […]
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Let’s balance the budget by charging for CO2
The Center for American Progress has released a plan that could balance the budget by 2030, lower some people’s income taxes, and cut carbon emissions 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. This isn’t just a Holy Grail, it’s an entire Holy Place Setting. The CAP plan proposes to eliminate the deficit mainly through taxes […]
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How green is this car? New fuel economy stickers give a few hints
The federal government is making it easier for consumers to buy an eco-friendly vehicle. New fuel economy window stickers released today detail annual fuel costs and fuel-costs savings and give greenhouse-gas ratings. The stickers will start appearing on 2013 models. It's a little busy with information, and the environmental community was pushing for a different […]
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New vehicle labels take three steps forward, one step back
This post was written by Therese Langer, transportation program director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and a contributing author at the ACEEE blog. The new vehicle fuel economy label announced today by the EPA and the Department of Transportation (DOT) beats the current label, providing better information on fuel costs and adding […]
