It’s not in the headlines or on the evening news, but there’s a big story that some people are discussing. And it’s going to get bigger and matter way more than the heat waves and extreme weather that everyone in climate circles is buzzing about this summer. To catch up on this story, you should…Continue Reading…
So what are the broader cultural, political and economic ripples of the German nuclear phase-out? On the one hand, it will send a signal to the world that nuclear is dated and dangerous and that switching it off is a greater priority than limiting carbon emissions as swiftly as possible. It will also damage the…Continue Reading…
Wired magazine has an interesting interview with biologist and science entrepreneur Craig Venter, who, as Wikipedia describes, is most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for his role in creating the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. The discussion is wide-ranging. At one point, Venter…Continue Reading…
At Grist, there is a box with a rotating set of five images that highlights content from the site. When I went over there recently, my eye gravitated to the colorful pictures in the box, including one with this subheadline for a blog post: Germany aims to trade nukes for a fully renewable power system….Continue Reading…
Greens who care most about global warming are in a tough spot. One of the biggest climate killers is coal, a 19th century fuel that may bake the planet well into the 21st century. As Jeff Goodell notes in Rolling Stone, We still burn nearly a billion tons of it a year in America, almost…Continue Reading…
Despite the immense human tragedy of the earthquake/tsunami that struck Japan one year ago, many media stories in the West this past week have focused on the Fukushima meltdown, which led Mark Lynas to tweet: I find the total silence about the 20,000 victims killed by the tsunami a year ago horrifying, current nuclear angst…Continue Reading…
When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, anti-nuclear sentiment rose to a crescendo in the early to mid-1980s, just as the Shoreham nuclear power plant on the Island’s eastern end was nearing completion. If you know your history, you know what happened around this time. As Wikipedia explains: The [Shoreham] plant faced…Continue Reading…
You may have heard, as Scientific American reports, that the “U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors” in Georgia. It’s a pretty big deal, since Jimmy Carter was President the last time a commercial reactor was approved. As the LA Times notes, the new Georgia plant is supposed to…Continue Reading…
David Roberts at Grist seems to have had an a ha! moment. In a long, wonky post about the “rebound effect,” he frames the grand challenge of emissions reduction as a problem that offers one of two choices: 2a. Drive down global energy intensity. 2b. Drive down global economic growth. Roberts runs through the math and concludes…Continue Reading…
I know everyone has been waiting on pins and needles about the future of this blog. The suspense has been killing me, too. Well, I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the latter. Your combined generosity has enabled me to buy some new socks, take my kids to a matinee movie and…Continue Reading…