Green Roofs – I have seen the future and it works. (Well, in the case of the Soviet Union, it didn’t, but with green roofs, it definitely does and will.) I’ve written before on this unbeatable approach to lowering the urban heat island effect, diminishing the troublesome problem of stormwater runoff, and providing a stunningly […]
The “NY Times” reports today on the massive cost overruns of a nuclear power plant at Olkiluoto in Finland and, in the end, the uncertainty of the date of its completion, testing and operation – if ever. The article reports that the difficulties with this flagship in the new generation of nuclear plants is making […]
Major Economies Forum (MEF) on Energy and Climate – After the second of four meetings scheduled to take place among the world’s major economies – all major contributors to global warming – the participants announced progress on finance. The 2nd MEF meeting took place this week in Paris. (See my notes from April on the […]
Vice President Joe Biden is on a victory tour, swinging through the country exulting the $787 billion stimulus package as a green job creator. In Denver, he boasted about the $11 billion for improving the electricity grid as well as the estimated 450,000 new jobs the bill will create. Despite the difficulty in defining a […]
There’s a characteristically comprehensive special report on energy in today’s “Financial Times,” a series of interesting articles, mostly on the state of play of fossil fuels. There’s also a great guest column from Jeremy Leggett the founder of Solarcentury, a provider of “intelligent generation.” Nota bene: According to Leggett, “In 2008, for the first time, […]
Nigerian militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) claimed to attack several pipelines of oil companies including Chevron yesterday, shitting in 100,000 barrels of crude a day. The attacks come in response as Nigerian forces over the past two weeks began a major operation against the rebel group. MEND claims […]
I’m out of town and so all I’ve got time to offer today is a note on a pretty good bit of political analysis on the cap-and-trade and energy bill from the “NY Times” today. I think that Tim Wirth, who leads the United Nations Foundation, always good for a good quote, has a salient […]
KISS – the engineer’s way of designing things that work. Solving the climate change crisis with nuclear fission plants to power the separation of oil from the billions of tons of tar in which it’s embedded – and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to get at the tar – is not a […]
In a move that went widely unreported last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled a plan that would allow additional drilling within state waters in an attempt to help ease California’s fiscal troubles. California had banned new exploration activity within state waters (an area that roughly extends nine miles from the coast) since the 1969 […]
The U.S. Senate voted on Monday to confirm President Obama’s nominee for Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Margaret Hamburg. The FDA is the oversight agency for food production as well as prescription drugs and medical devices. Dr. Hamburg is a Harvard-trained doctor and former New York City health commissioner known for […]
This article by Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, appears in the May 2009 issue of Scientific American magazine. In his analysis, Brown argues that causal factors such as the current world order, water shortages, eroding soil, and rising global temperatures are threatening not only the global food supply, but world civilization as […]
I touched on the massive oil prospecting and processing operations in Alberta here in February, and here a while back. (For a characteristically articulate and comprehensive overview, you can’t beat Betsy Kolbert’s “New Yorker” article, Unconventional Crude.) StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil and gas company, one of the biggest in the world, has a big […]
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