The world's best thinkers on energy and climate
At this past summer’s meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), I served on a panel of experts discussing what might happen to America’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the wake of the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. … [Read more...]
This summer was anything but quiet for climate policy. In June, President Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt's attempt to suspend protections from climate-destabilizing oil and gas pollution, calling the move “unauthorized” and “unreasonable.” … [Read more...]
India’s turn toward renewable energy has been widely hailed, but the future promises challenges that put the country’s climate leadership to test. … [Read more...]
An ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) resource map like the one above, where the palate ranges from red to yellow to indicate ocean surface temperatures ranging from 28oC or above down to 22oC is essentially a map of the impact of global warming. Recognition of the problem is the first step towards its solution and from there you can ascertain where to allocate the resources necessary to realise your solution. … [Read more...]
Robert Samuelson recently claimed in the Washington Post, “Based on present technology and knowledge, we don’t know how to solve global warming.” This is a cop out. We know what to do. Politicians simply don’t want to invest the political capital necessary to solve a problem that will outlive their term of office. And the attention of venture capitalists is even shorter. … [Read more...]
Bill Gates has called for an energy miracle and that is precisely what the new political alignment in British Columbia can produce. The Oxford dictionary defines a miracle as an exceptional product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something therefore the use, reduction, reuse and recycling of the heat of global warming to useful work can rightfully be described an energy miracle. … [Read more...]
Describing himself as an “energy optimist” and a “climate realist,” former U.S. Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC, pictured) told an MIT audience on Tuesday, April 25, that solutions to address climate change are within reach, but that support from conservatives will be indispensable to moving them forward. “If there is going to be action, it is essential that conservatives join this,” said Inglis, the founder of RepublicEn and one of the country’s … [Read more...]
On the eve of a Trump administration we would be wise to harken back to the words of President Kennedy. The term moonshot entered popular lexicon in 1961 when Kennedy announced the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade but the term has become synonymous with any astronomically ambitious project; especially one undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full … [Read more...]
Many pixels have lit up with speculation about whether the Trump administration will pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, but there’s been little discussion of 2016’s other climate accord: the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Approved on October 16, 2016, by representatives of nearly 200 countries, the amendment is designed to curtail the production and use of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, which are known … [Read more...]
About a sixth of the world’s electricity is produced by hydro-power and about seventy percent of its renewable energy. This renewable energy source exploits the energy potential of gravity, which is overcome by evaporation that converts water on a surface of a body of water into a vapor that rises to a higher elevation where it is precipitated and gains new gravitational potential. A mass of water (in kgs) raised to a height (in meters) times … [Read more...]
China’s pledges to combat climate change have been some of its most lauded actions by the international community, but an ongoing domestic build-out of coal-fired power generation capacity has caused some within this community to doubt the country’s commitment. The oft-cited “one new coal plant per week” statistic (recently upped in a Bloomberg article to “two new plants per week”) is often offered as definitive proof that the country’s expansion … [Read more...]
The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference agreed to set a goal of limiting global warming to less than 2°C compared to the pre-industrial level and to "pursue efforts to" limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. The World Resource Institute (WRI) infographic for a low emissions pathway to 2°C shows CO2 emissions have to peak by 2020 and then drop by 66% below 2010 levels by 2050. The WRI medium, high and highest emissions … [Read more...]
Last week, I wrote about “The Treasure of the Sierra Nevada” -- the treasure being trillions of tons of soluble carbonate minerals salted away in and below the desert playas of the Great Basin. The minerals are the stranded byproducts of several million years of chemical weathering of granite and other rock on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The weathering products never made it to the sea, because the runoff waters that carried … [Read more...]
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