This tweet caught my eye: Prof Joachim Schellnhuber, at @PIK_climate: “Stabilizing the climate and combating poverty is largely the same thing” #COP20Lima — Damian Carrington (@dpcarrington) November 28, 2014 A greater elaboration on this statement by Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, can be read here. It starts out this…Continue Reading…
It wasn’t that long ago that global warming was mostly discussed as (and believed to be) a distant threat– the scope, timing and severity of its impacts considered uncertain. Then in recent years, as climate scientists began studying and asserting linkages between greenhouses gases and severe weather events, the discourse shifted. We are now at…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, the notion of “clean coal” was widely panned. As Bryan Walsh wrote in a 2009 Time piece: currently there’s no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. Critics in the Guardian and elsewhere dismissed “clean coal” as industry greenwash. But…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Candace Sheppard Wind energy production in New York State is expected to double in the next five years. Photo by U.S. Department of Energy. A day after a study was released last week about wind turbines killing more than 600,000 bats in the United States in 2012, the Environment America Research Policy Center released its second report about…Continue Reading…
Several weeks ago, this was the headline for a press release: Mayor Bloomberg announces New York City’s air quality has reached the cleanest levels in more than 50 years. That’s quite a claim. Most media outlets reporting this story cut and pasted from the press release; few bothered to delve into the report Bloomberg was…Continue Reading…
If you thought that the U.S. government shutdown was the top story at the Wall Street Journal today (print edition), you would be wrong. Instead, this headline took the honor: U.S. Rises to No. 1 Energy Producer Whoa. This wasn’t supposed to happen until 2017, according to recent projections by the International Energy Agency. But some…Continue Reading…
Several months ago, I wondered if the media’s fascination with peak oil, which crested in the mid-2000s, had ended. A big concern of many in the energy/sustainability nexus had found expression in popular culture and in visuals like this: But now the zeitgeist has flipped, from crude awakening to crude abundance, thanks to advances in…Continue Reading…
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for Slate that probed the argument for nuclear power, which, in a nutshell, is based on the climate change imperative. I didn’t sugarcoat the serious obstacles to a nuclear build-out. I also said that solar and wind should be ramped up. At the same time, I sided with…Continue Reading…
If I were a coal executive I wouldn’t worry about a solar and wind revolution (see Germany’s Energiewende) or President Obama putting me out of business. I’d be worried about the shale gas revolution (and I’d hope environmentalists were successful in stopping it). If I were a coal executive, I’d want fear to continue dominating public discussion of nuclear…Continue Reading…
In a recent report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) lamented: The picture is as clear as it is disturbing: the carbon intensity of the global energy supply has barely changed in 20 years, despite successful efforts in deploying renewable energy. Another fact, noted in the IEA’s report, will disturb anyone concerned about climate change: The unremitting…Continue Reading…