The pic to the left exemplifies something we see in our lives every day: someone telling us something we know is deliberately (in this case laughably) mischaracterized. What a wonderful opportunity this is to plug my friends at EnergyFactCheck.Org, who deal with the constant bombardment of disinformation on renewable energy that is so aggressively disseminated by the oil companies. (more…)
My brilliant colleague Jennifer Runyon (pictured), chief editor of RenewableEnergyWorld.com and Renewable Energy World magazine, wrote this piece on the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) associated with renewables and fossil fuels, and how this comparison continues to tip in the favor of clean energy sources. This, of course, echoes the findings I lay out in my most recent book: Bullish on Renewable Energy.
Nice job, Jennifer.
A dear friend is in the process of delivering a great number of speeches through South Africa right now, and I just received a note from him explaining that he often quotes Nelson Mandela (not a bad example of a man who could inspire others around him). My friend writes: (more…)
Water is a critical component in a lot of environmental schemes. Whether the focus is on saving it, using it better, or how it can benefit any given project, water always seems to crop up whenever environmental issues are approached.
Today we’ll turn our focus on a more narrow water topic. (more…)
It’s such an interesting time to be alive. The stakes are so high, and there seems to be a greater divide than ever between good and bad.
Good things and people are better than they’ve been before. We have a humanitarian Pope for the first time in the 1600-year history of the Catholic Church. We have presidential candidates who are getting real traction with platforms that include climate change mitigation and campaign finance reform. (more…)
A referendum on the California ballot in 2016 will provide voters the opportunity to express their rancor with respect to the dreaded Citizen’s United decision. In 2012, two other states—Colorado and Montana—ratified similar resolutions by overwhelming majorities.
My prediction: (more…)
We live in a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and the chairman of a senate environmental panel introduced a snowball as evidence that climate change is a hoax. Frustrating, right? How much lower can we sink in terms of anti-intellectualism?
One thinks immediately, of course, about the nightly news broadcasts. But if we think that the US has a lock on news coverage that focuses on meaningless drivel, I urge you to check this out. I laughed so loud the people outside my office door must think I’m on some sort of drug.
Existentialism is the concept that we live in a universe that is indifferent to our happiness and general welfare, that we are free to make our own choices, and that we are, in fact, defined by the totality of those choices. Some say that’s a gloomy proposition because it implies that we must act in the complete absence of any leadership or guidelines, but I prefer to view it in the opposite fashion: wouldn’t you rather be the captain of your ship than one of the deck-hands?
In any case, I bring this up as it’s the 113th birthday of the 20th Century American poet e. e. cummings, (more…)
In the 1960s, when the tobacco industry learned that its product caused cancer and that millions of its customers would suffer agonizing deaths as a result of smoking cigarettes, its leaders conspired to suppress this finding, so as to protect their profit stream. Now we’re confronting another shocking truth: it was only a decade later that Big Oil (Exxon in particular) followed the identical path. In the late 1970s the company’s own scientists proved that the consumption of fossil fuels was rapidly warming the Earth’s atmosphere and irreparably altering its climate, but the firm, (now ExxonMobil) made a decision to hide this conclusion and work to discredit anyone whose research pointed in the direction of anthropogenic climate change. (more…)
Our intern, Fabio Porcu asks: I’m writing about batteries but it’s a very large topic. Do you prefer that I write about the physics behind it, or about the different technologies used today?
I think this should be broken down into several areas, about which you could write short posts: (more…)
