Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Muddled up in climate politics
Asher Miller is executive director of think tank Post Carbon Institute. Any opinion expressed here is his own.
For those of us hoping for substantive climate or energy legislation in the near future, Tuesday’s election was a mixed bag at best.
And that’s after having lowered our expectations following Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) decision to pull the plug on advancing the American Power Act back in July.
If Democrats couldn’t muster the votes or political capital with majorities in both houses of Congress, there was little chance following a mid-term election that was sure to weaken their hold.
The quest to put solar power back on the White House
Bill McKibben, founder of the green group 350.org, is on a quest to convince President Barack Obama to put solar panels back on the roof of the White House.
He’s at the end of a journey to Washington from Maine in a van fired by biodiesel carrying one of the 32 panels Jimmy Carter unveiled in 1979 during the first press conference on the White House roof.
Clean energy conference shows efficiency means savings
-Eileen Claussen is President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The views expressed are her own.-
While policymakers in Washington debate the best path forward for dealing with climate change, a growing number of U.S. businesses have discovered a simple technique that can lower costs, increase productivity, and slash greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, it can work for any business no matter what they make – whether it’s potato chips or computer chips.
from Summit Notebook:
Awaiting the alternative energy sukuk: Innovation vs conservatism
MANAMA, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Dubai’s debt fiasco and real estate bubble bust pushes investors to look out for alternative assets underlying Islamic finance products – could renewable energy provide a way-out?
Predominantly, Islamic finance and investment products have been backed by infrastructure or commodities assets. But executives at the 2010 Reuters Islamic Banking and Finance Summit said product diversification was needed to cut the over-reliance on real estate in the Gulf.
Goldilocks and the three fuels
– Richard Heinberg is the author of eight books, including “Peak Everything”, “Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis” and “The Party’s Over”. He is also a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute. The views expressed are his own. –
Recent shale gas projects, including those involving the massive Marcellus Shale in several northeastern states, have been yielding significant quantities of fuel. Reserves of the stuff are enormous. But drilling costs and per-well decline rates are high, so producers can make a profit only if gas prices are near historic highs.
Bring on the green energy investment
- Danny Harvey is a geography professor and energy policy expert at the University of Toronto. He is author of A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques and Examples, and the forthcoming Energy and the New Reality, Volume 2: C-free Energy, now available in preprint form here.
The world is facing the prospect of massive climatic change during the coming decades, and we’re already seeing the beginnings of this all around us and much faster than predicted – dramatic melting of sea ice, thawing of permafrost, increased loss of ice from Greenland, and drier conditions in many parts of the world.
from Summit Notebook:
60-hour work weeks, all in the name of climate change
Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can't say members of the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism's executive board aren't clocking in the hours.
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.
from Summit Notebook:
Enviro-boxer Britain needs to spend more on climate cure
Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain's top academics wouldn't trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
"Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it's a doddle compared to the politics," said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain's science academy.
from Summit Notebook:
Silver Spring Networks shows grid smarts
Scott Lang, the Chief Executive of Silver Spring Networks, sat down at Reuters' Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about building and expanding within green tech sector.
Here Lang discusses how his company's technology for reporting power consumption to utilities also finds problems quickly.
from Summit Notebook:
BrightSource CEO talks about building carbon-free future
John Woolard, the chief executive of solar thermal energy company BrightSource, sat down at Reuters' Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco to talk about energy efficiency, project financing and the future of carbon-free power.
His advice: build fast!
(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)
