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…
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…
So while American politicians and environmentalists slug it out over a proposed pipeline, China is stocking its rainy day shale and oil sands fund. Let’s start with the recent news out of Canada: China will take over full ownership over a Canadian oil sands project for the first time after Athabasca Oil Sands Corp announced…Continue Reading…
Yesterday’s announcement by the Obama Administration to postpone a final decision on the Keystone pipeline until after the 20012 Presidential has triggered much chatter and insta-analysis. There are two smart takes worth pointing out. The first is this NYT op-ed by Michael Levi, a climate and energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, which…Continue Reading…
Michael Levi, a climate and energy analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, shoots down Joe Romm and Real Climate in one post. I sense that it pains him to do this, especially with regard to the latter. More on that in a minute. First, I want to point out that Levi’s argument about the…Continue Reading…