Climate Change

I looked last month at the car of the future, and particularly a superb show from Nova. Zero emission cars fueled by zero emission power plants give zero emissions. That equation works for me. (See also A Little Automotive Fun – Plus Some Serious Business from a year ago, and other posts under Transportation.) There's […]

Tax Credits for Renewables – The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 (H.R. 6049) passed the House on Wednesday. See this from RenewableEnergyWorld.com and this from Gristmill. Although it was looking like a done deal not long ago , see Tax Breaks, Finally, for Renewables , there may yet be choppy waters reconciling […]

I wrote about Energy Efficiency for Fun and Profit back in February. Energy efficiency is where you get the most bang for the buck in reducing GHG. In fact, you save money with efficiency. Dow Chemical, for instance, reduced its energy intensity by 38 per cent between 1990 to 2005. They spent $1 billion and […]

Christians and Global Warming – Christians Launch Campaign against Global Warming Hype is the story from “The Christian Post.” “The “We Get It!‘ declaration, which currently has nearly 100 signers, is backed by prominent Christians including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, […]

(More in this space on bottled water soon.)

Cap-and-Trade Bonanza , "Fortune" has a Sustainability column authored by Marc Gunther and this week he's got a story on how we're going to divvy up the proceeds from the inevitable U.S. cap-and-trade program that will be on the books sometime in 2009.  See A $3 trillion climate change battle.  As Gunther writes, "The issue […]

The big news came from John McCain on Monday.  McCain Pledges To Combat Climate Change is the story from Reuters' "Planet Ark" service.  In an obvious attempt to delineate the difference between President Bush and himself, he said "I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit […]

With the West Virginia primary tomorrow, and Kentucky next week, coal and coal mining become more visible as issues.  I wrote about this in April at Quick Political Note , Coal and the Candidates. The Sundance Channel is going to premier a blockbuster movie, Burning the Future: Coal in America, tomorrow night.  That’s 9:35 PM […]

Over the past several days as we've seen the death and damage from the storm in Burma/Myanmar metastasize, there has been a greater-than-usual sense of impotency on the part of the international community in its inability to rise to the challenge. There is the extraordinary scale of the disaster, and the fact that so much […]

Here's an eye-catching quote:  "I believe the age of fossil fuels is coming to end – and that the age of clean energy will follow."  That's what Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week.  See this from the AP. Massachusetts is home, as you probably know, to the […]

Deanne Upson, a consultant on climate change in Washington, posed a great question at my post below on soot and solar cookers. In a nutshell, she asked how would you design an energy-efficient home for low and middle-income people in the developing world or in economically distressed areas. I thought a reply rated a post […]

In my post from March 29 on the "State of the Planet "08" conference, sponsored by The Earth Institute and "The Economist," I talked about a close encounter I had with the gentle Chairlady of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.  We talked about nuclear power and I said, among other things, that societies needed […]