Climate Technology
All Stories
-
Offshore wind power to explode to 17 times its current capacity in just six years
Offshore wind will reach 70.1 GW of capacity by 2017, says Pike Research. That's 17 times its current capacity, which is 4.1 GW, and amounts to several times the current maximum solar capacity of the most solared-out country in the world, Germany. Europe is currently in the lead on offshore power, but by 2017, China […]
-
How the internet is saving the physical world by making it disappear
In 2009, a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford made the case that the switch to downloading music from transporting physical CDs had significantly reduced the carbon footprint of Americans' music consumption. That's just one of countless examples of "ephemeralization," which is the process by which new, post industrial-revolution technology tends to lead to […]
-
Warren Buffett doesn’t believe CO2 is a real risk for Berkshire Hathaway
The wise man responsible for all those Geico ads may not be so wise when it comes to climate issues.Photo: JavierBillionaire investor Warren Buffett appears seriously confused about the risks posed by greenhouse gases. Two years ago, the sage of Omaha wrote, “Doubling the carbon dioxide we belch into the atmosphere may far more than […]
-
Green doesn’t sell to mouth-breathing Americans, says CEO of GE
GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not […]
-
How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse
While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]
-
Better Place taps China in bid to take over the world, more or less
If a supervillain wanted to roll out a plan to turn the planet's car infrastructure on its head, he could hardly do better than the deal that Israeli company Better Place just announced with the China Southern Power Grid Co. Better Place is a company that wants to replace filling stations with battery swapping stations. […]
-
Portland, Maine, to save 50,000 gallons of oil a year with geothermal heating and cooling
Portland, Maine's new airport expansion is to be the first in the country to use a dead-simple but often overlooked technology to significantly reduce its heating and cooling bills. They're calling it a geothermal system, but it's not like the kind that produce power in Iceland; it's more properly called a "ground-source heat pump." The […]
-
Care about the forest? Here’s what you can do
Who cares about the forest? That’s the question author/artist Franke James explores in this creative personal story commissioned by the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada. Check out the visual essay below, or watch it as an animated video.
-
Meet the world’s most high-tech bike
It's pretty impressive that we're still chugging along on human-powered vehicles only a step more high-tech than a velocipede — olde-tyme bikes look basically like the ones we've got today. Why improve on perfection, right? Well, maybe just for the sheer badassery of it. At least, that seems to be the theory behind the Alpha, […]
-
On Coachella’s solar stage
It was a sunny year at the 2011 Coachella Music Festival, and the stage is set for the town’s new concentrating photovoltaic farm.Photo: Paige K. ParsonsAn interesting solar development got buried by Thursday’s big news that French fossil fuel conglomerate Total had agreed to acquire a majority stake in SunPower, the Silicon Valley photovoltaic panel […]
