Civil engineering is a career that involves creating, improving and protecting the environment in which we live. Civil engineers are tasked with planning, designing and overseeing the maintenance and construction of building facilities and structures like roads, bridges, airports, railways, harbors, dams, power plants, irrigation projects and wastewater systems. (more…)
One day last month, Germany generated 90% of its electricity from renewable resources. Though this is a rarity (their average in 2015 was 33%, up from 28% in 2014), the world stands in awe of what these folks have done in terms of innovation in the energy sector. (more…)
In many cases, the challenges of sustainability are made more difficult by various vicious cycles, where certain bad phenomena feed on themselves and thus enter a pattern of ever-increasing acceleration. A good example of this effect is ocean acidification, which we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, in which: (more…)
My colleague Jon LeSage of “Green Auto Digest” fame has written a book about his own experience with the future of urban mobilit
y, Tales of UberMan: An auto journalist shares his Prius with savvy riders, published as a Kindle e-book. I thought readers might be interested in a press release, providing some details.
A reader sent me this article about a fire of unknown cause, blazing in the tower of the large solar thermal facility in Nevada (Ivanpah). Whenever I see stuff like this, i.e., pointing out how nascent technology doesn’t work perfectly all the time, I’m reminded of all the people in history who look so foolish today, who bet against the feasibililty of the telephone, the automobile, the computer, etc.
Here’s the president of Vestas Americas, Chris Brown, speaking to a large audience at WINDPOWER 2016. An excerpt:
Sustainability is the next chapter in human progress, and the key is making renewable technology economic. (more…)
Of course, we at 2GreenEnergy view Obama’s tenure as president through the lens of environmental issues, something on which he gets very high grades. Linked above is a post in which I present 60 important accomplishments in this space, each with citations, reprinted from the website PleaseCutTheCrap.com.
This article makes an excellent, more general, point as well. Extremely worthwhile reading.
I am a big fan of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens; here’s the post I wrote in gratitude for his service when he left the bench six years ago.
Fortunately for us all, Stevens lives on, enabling him to make important suggestions on the U.S. Constitution. (more…)
Frequent commenter MarcoPolo took some level of umbrage with my post in which I mentioned that the largest public university in the U.S. had divested itself from fossil fuels. His main point: damaging the oil companies’ profits would send the economy into a tailspin. (more…)
To anyone wishing to know why Andrew Jackson’s image should be removed from U.S. currency, I refer this note in today’s Writer’s Almanac: (more…)
