Climate Change

I just had to flag this article, from the “NY Times” Sunday magazine, by Elizabeth Royte, a terrific writer with an unbeatable subject:  Will Allen, an urban farmer who’s got a model that needs to be replicated, taught and otherwise advanced everywhere.  This guy is really on it! He’s reducing waste (six million pounds of […]

I want to mark July 4th, Independence Day for Americans, by noting a few good renewable energy stories.  There are scores of these stories, all over the world, every week, and I’m just sharing what I think are some of the plums that I’ve been seeing.  Renewables are a theme I’ve visited here time and […]

I’ve written several times about the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) convened by President Obama to seriously address the critical international negotiations this year.  Most of the governments that contribute 80% of the total GHG emissions have been engaged since April in extensive discussions.  The leaders of the MEF countries will be […]

I want to flag four important major reports on the impacts from climate change.  Three of these came out in June, the third a few months back.  What all four do is underscore the urgency of our situation. As you know, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out […]

We were away for several days (see post below), otherwise I would’ve further deluged you with information on the passage of the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka ACES, beyond what you may already have been experiencing.  I should, of course, weigh in with my humble opinion.  My first impulse, given […]

The Adirondack Park “…is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States…”  It’s protected by the NY State constitution and the publicly owned lands within it are to be kept “forever wild.”  One of the many gems of the park is Lake George which Thomas Jefferson described in 1791 as “…without comparison the […]

I’ve written admiringly of Bill McKibben, one of our leading environmental philosophers and journalists.  He reviewed Lord Stern’s The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity in a recent issue of the “NY Review of Books.”  The review covered a lot of good ground but it strayed […]

House Floor Vote – The word from Capitol Hill is that the crucial vote on the Waxman-Markey package of energy and climate change titles is going to happen this week.  The timing as Steny Hoyer indicated previously was to be sometime on either side of the July 4th recess.  The word yesterday was that it […]

This cartoon, from Alex Gregory at “The New Yorker” (May 11, 2009), is a pause for fresh air.

I wrote here recently about some developments in concentrated solar power (CSP). The “NY Times” had a really interesting read the other day on the confluence of American labor – in the shape of California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) – and the exploding solar power industry. The article wraps up with, to my mind, […]

I went to GreenBuildingsNY 2009 the other day and had a fine time. The show had everything from windows and doors, to toilets and garbage disposals, to solar PV and green roofs – and beyond. Knowledgeable vendors, great stuff. Green building, for my money, has nothing but upside. As I wrote in my article for […]

Deutsche Bank yesterday unveiled an enormous display outside New York’s Madison Square Garden/Penn Station complex.  What’s it show?  “The current quantity of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as shown by the Carbon Counter is 3.64 trillion metric tons, increasing by approximately 2 billion metric tons per month,” according to DB’s release.  “‘The Carbon Counter […]