The super motivated students of NYU Divest met with the University Senate yesterday. They marked that important step forward with a great visual display of their intention. I’ve had the pleasure of being involved a bit with these students over the past year. They have a goal, a plan, and are executing it smartly.
It’s Blog Action Day all over the world today and the theme this year is Inequality. From my perspective, the main example of inequality in our world today is energy poverty. This is defined by the International Energy Agency as “…a lack of access to modern energy services. These services are defined as household access to electricity and clean cooking facilities (e.g. fuels and stoves that do not cause air pollution in houses).” 18% of the seven billion of us today don’t have electricity and a whopping 38% don’t have a clean way to cook. Continue reading
Action This Day. That’s what Winston Churchill wrote on many of his memos. It has always worked for me as a call to arms. Action was the persistent theme of the recent UN Climate Summit. I had the good fortune to be there last week and I was, after a fair number of years of observing the environmental scene, somewhat in awe of the tone and timbre of the speeches in support of climate action. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been building support for nearly a year for a successful summit, with leaders of governments, business and civil society in abundance coming to speak and to make commitments. Continue reading
New York City this week and next is the center of the Climate Activist universe. I define activism broadly: it means not only being in the streets and expressing discontent with the pace of change toward decarbonizing and denuclearizing our energy economies to save the climate system, but also doing the hard work of researching, litigating, legislating, organizing, writing, speaking, making movies, teaching, farming, financing, designing, planning, building, regulating, and working, day after day, to create the newer world that we need. I celebrate everybody and all the energy and focus and commitment brought over the past 50 years of the modern environmental movement that has brought us forward. The first environmental journalist, Phil Shabecoff, wrote a great book, A Fierce Green Fire, about the movement. (They made a documentary last year too.)
There’s a useful and interesting new site from the good folks at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: their Newsroom. What they’ve done is create a clearing house for news from all over the world in five general categories: Financial Flows, Green Urban, Clean Energy, Nature’s Role, and Action to Adapt. There are, of course, also updates on important meetings including the upcoming Climate Summit in New York in September. Continue reading
I’m happy to report that I’ve got a new article at Ensia, the magazine and website of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. Denmark’s Near-Zero-Waste Wonder is about the longstanding and ongoing successes at Kalundborg, the site of one of the world’s best examples of industrial ecology. Continue reading
I had the pleasure a few weeks ago to lend a small helping hand to the good folks at Student Energy. They organized a series of regional summits and I helped provide some guidance to students who were engaged in an exercise to sharpen their blogging skills. Jared Anderson, the Managing Editor of Breaking Energy (and an alum of the grad program at NYU where I teach), was the other guide. Continue reading
Once again Gary Trudeau nails it on the head. There’s really not a lot to add. However, if your appetite is whetted, you might like to check out some of what Barack Obama said at a commencement address a little over a week ago in California.
For instance: “And today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change. They will tell you it is a hoax, or a fad. One member of Congress actually says the world is cooling. There was one member of Congress who mentioned a theory involving ‘dinosaur flatulence’ — which I won’t get into.” Continue reading
The star attraction at last week’s energy conference at Columbia was, for my money, John Podesta. He was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff at the White House, founder of the Center for American Progress – an indispensable think tank, director of the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008, and now Counselor to President Obama. The principal reason he was brought in for the second term was to help the White House realize its critical goals on climate and energy. Podesta reminded us that the President considers it a “moral imperative” to act on climate change – as should we all. Continue reading
I was up at Columbia University Thursday for the Spring 2014 Energy Policy Conference convened by the Center on Global Energy Policy. The very interesting line up of experts included the head of Statoil, Helge Lund; the former head of Duke Energy (the nation’s largest electric power utility), Jim Rogers; and superstar energy analyst and author, Dan Yergin, among a number of other worthies. I came to hear John Podesta, Counselor to President Obama, and the White House point man on climate and energy. Continue reading