see note at end of post
I wrote a year ago about what our plans were for the new house we’d bought: Watching the Meter Run Backwards. Well, we just completed the plan a few weeks ago: We picked up our new EV.
The plan was to install solar photovoltaic panels. We did that in December. After that the heat pumps went in in January. Then we went shopping for an electric vehicle and made our choice in May. Continue reading
Nuclear power has been a bête noire of mine for decades. When I was a kid, I thought this was the future – power “too cheap to meter” as the high priests of the cult of the atom told us. But a book came out in 1971 by two veterans of the American nuclear project that was an epiphany for me: Poisoned Power. Long before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, it made a convincing case against nuclear power. In the half century since, I have seen virtually nothing that has made me rethink my opposition. A brilliant new book, Atoms and Ashes – A Global History of Nuclear Disasters, has further deepened my convictions – not that they really needed any deepening, as my posts here will attest. Continue reading
(Click on the graphic to open it in a new window.)
Here’s a headline for you: The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20.
Maybe you didn’t see that coming. Well, Amory Lovins, among others, saw it coming. I heard him speak at a conference in New York City in the fall of 2009 and he said then: “The Renewable Revolution has been won. Sorry, if you missed it.”
I wrote about Cadillac Desert, the classic book about water in the American West, in September. Scores of millions of people depend on the waterworks that were built up over the 20th Century there, and many millions more benefit from the bounty of fruits and vegetables that grow there, much of it in California, where agriculture accounts for 80% of overall use. The story of Cadillac Desert, though, is that there has been a tremendous price paid for all that concrete, steel, energy, and the treasure needed to build and operate the waterworks. Environmental destruction has been catastrophic, lives were lost when dams broke, thousands of small farmers and their communities were destituted because the water too often benefited Big Ag, and the American taxpayer was bilked out of billions over time. Continue reading
I haven’t taken an extended look at the many ins and outs of natural gas for a good long while. It’s a bloody big topic. But let me preface this by first quoting Amory Lovins, the maestro of the “soft energy path.” I heard him speak at an event over ten years ago. What he said then still reverberates in my psyche: “The ‘renewables revolution’ has been won. Sorry if you missed it.” There is no doubt, at this late date, that solar and wind and the array of other modern renewables, along with energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, and other clean tech are well and truly burgeoning. The numbers don’t lie. Continue reading
I went to a cool little rally last evening here in New York City. We were standing across from the David H. Koch theater at Lincoln Center to say “No!” to the KXL. We were there, of course, because the Koch Brothers have been the principal funders in recent years of any number of reactionary organizations, including Americans for Prosperity and ALEC, not to mention the Tea Party itself. Of course, they have a serious vested interest in the Canadian tar sands. By the time I left, we had a good 200 or so people out on a cold night. The excellent folks at 350NYC organized the rally and we knew that there were scores more across the country at the same time. Continue reading
Here are the world’s four largest emitters of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and cement production. In 2013, China accounted for twice of America’s carbon dioxide output. Collectively, the world blasted 36 billion tons of CO2 into the climate system – nearly ¾ of the total global burden of greenhouse gases. Continue reading
John Kerry is a climate hawk. I’ve been a fan since before 2004 when I helped out on his presidential campaign. (Heavy sigh.) Now that he’s the US Secretary of State, he’s in a unique, critical position to be able to significantly advance an agenda of moving us off the path of self-destruction we’ve been on and onto one in which everyone can enjoy abundant energy and clean air and clean water, not to mention a climate system that will be able to heal itself over time. Continue reading
This is an eye-catching graphic, wouldn’t you say? It’s for a talk that Amory Lovins gave at Yale exactly two years ago. (See also the companion interview from the superb online journal Yale Environment 360.)
I use Reinventing Fire from Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute as a textbook for my graduate and continuing ed classes on clean tech. There is no more comprehensive, Continue reading
(graphic from The Ecologist)
I can’t really say it often enough: nuclear power is a scandal. It’s squandered trillions of dollars, generated waste that will be lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, blighted vast areas of Japan and the Ukraine – and is still an accident waiting to happen. But, you say, in this age of warming, we need clean nuclear power to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Utter, unadulterated, dangerously stupid bullshit! Okay? Can it be said any more clearly than that? Part of the extraordinary tragedy of commercial nuclear power is the fact that while the planet is truly burning, the Nukefists are fiddling away time, money, expertise and political will with this proven outrage of a technology. Continue reading