The world's best thinkers on energy and climate
Although President Trump has committed to pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, many of our cities are still moving full steam ahead to clear the air and fight climate change. More than 200 U.S. municipalities have declared that they are "still in" on meeting the Paris targets. … [Read more...]
Ed Osann, Senior Policy Analyst, Santa MonicaToday they’re short of water. Tomorrow they’ll be short of cash. As water supplies dwindle in the face of the driest year in California’s history, most of the state’s urban water utilities face 2014 financially flatfooted. CalTrans Highway Sign 2014 -- photo: Eric Beteille, pedestrianphotographer.comCustomers have been asked to conserve water, but … [Read more...]
Customer Service Week hosted a discussion this morning with Opower‘s VP-Analytics Nancy Hersch and Customer Insights Senior Manager Lauren Llewellyn about five truths about utility customers the company is finding in its quantitative and qualitative research.Since early 2012, Opower has reached beyond North America conducting this research, working now with 90+ utilities around the globe. Opower claims it has helped utilities cumulatively save … [Read more...]
Photo courtesy of Joe Athialy, Bank Information Center Just a few short months ago the World Bank got itself on the right side of history by placing severe restrictions on coal finance. That was thanks in large part to World Bank President Dr. Kim's leadership. Now the institutions past transgressions are coming back to haunt him. An internal investigation into the controversial Tata Mundra project in India has found widespread impacts and … [Read more...]
The Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s independent auditor and watchdog agency, added climate change to its list of “high-risk” threats to the nation’s fiscal health.“Climate change creates significant financial risks for the federal government,” the GAO report said. “The federal government is not well positioned to address the fiscal exposure presented by climate change, and needs a government wide strategic approach with … [Read more...]
Significantly limiting humanity’s impact on the global climate is quite simply an enormous task. Unfortunately, thanks to budget austerity and federal gridlock, any hope of implementing sweeping U.S. climate/energy policy has been optimistically pushed back to 2013 or beyond (though some incremental improvement is possible). And even the most hopeful observers of the recent global climate negotiations in Durban find little real progress … [Read more...]
Question: What do President Barack Obama and ex-President Jimmy Carter have in common? Answer: Both presided over strong increases in domestic oil production that were a result of decisions made before they took office, as I explain in this post. In my recent post The Oilman in the White House, I posted the following graphic: Is There More to this Graphic than Meets the Eye? The purpose of the graphic was to get people to think about why oil … [Read more...]
Two Sides of a Coin In a recent video blog about energy politics, I stated that in my opinion each of the major political parties in the U.S. only gets half of the energy picture. Democrats tend to demonize oil usage, with many believing that we can shift to renewables for our energy needs. To be clear, we can — but not in the way they imagine. They simply underestimate the role oil plays in our lives, and therefore overestimate the ease of a … [Read more...]
Our most recent Policy Tracker is available now, with updates on important energy efficiency policy and building energy code developments from across the Northeast, including: State Energy Efficiency Plans: EmPOWER Maryland 2012-2014 plans and Rhode Island 2012-2014 Energy Efficiency Plan Building Energy Codes: Updates in Connecticut and Vermont and new proceedings in Maryland and Pennsylvania The latest resources from NEEP’s Policy … [Read more...]
I wrote the post below a week or so ago and thought later I should take it down because it was too negative. In fact, a few people unsubscribed to this blog immediately after I posted it. I do like to use this blog to build hope that there are technologies, policy options, and creative initiatives out there to make the world a more sustainable place. But a few people who read the post before I took it down have encouraged me to re-post it. It’s … [Read more...]
Individual action won’t do to solve global warming. It needs to be something collective. But what if individual action is all you’ve got? Say you are running a small, grassroots organization with the aim of making a difference in the community. You can do a lot of good by advocating for all the things that matter to the community. Global warming or global overfishing affects your community, but it’s also clear that your individual actions won’t … [Read more...]
In the previous TCASE post, I considered how various low-carbon energy technologies meet the following criteria: commercial readiness, scalability, dispatchability, fuel constraints, load access, storage requirements, capacity factor and emissions intensity. Here I consider the next issue: cost of deployment, based on expert consensus. Emission intensity for fit-for-service baseload electricity generating technologies. Error bars represent … [Read more...]
We have only ten years to act on climate! Four years ago we only had ten years to act! Ten years ago we only had ten years to act! Twenty years ago, the same!This is very poor messaging, even though in a sense it is true.Let me try to explain how this could be true in some sense. Then maybe we can consider how to say this better.Different processes have different time constants. Suppose you are driving on an isolated mountain road and find … [Read more...]
![Can Accountants Succeed on Climate Where Others Have Failed? [Video]](http://www.theenergycollective.com/wp-content/uploads/accounting-150x150.jpg)
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