The concept of the “negawatt” has been in our vocabulary for several decades now; I believe it was the creation of environmental scientist Amory Lovins (pictured). The idea is simply that the cheapest and most environmentally friendly kilowatt-hour of electricity is the one we don’t generate in the first place. (more…)
It’s certainly not a new idea that human beings, Americans in particular, tend to have short attention spans and are easily “issue-fatigued.” This is exacerbated by the corporate media which, in its quest for ratings (equivalent to dollars), crank up new stories, normally about trivial garbage, at a pace calculated to lead the typical American consumer along by the nose.
The Center for Biological Diversity writes:
We don’t get it: The Obama administration says it wants to fight climate change, but it keeps opening our public lands to more brutal fossil fuel extraction. (more…)
I’m happy to announce that we have a new volunteer here at 2GreenEnergy whose passion revolves around electric vehicles—especially insofar as they can be manufactured in the U.S. I was in the process of writing her a private email offering suggestions for research topics when it occurred to me that there was really nothing private about it at all, and so I’m publishing it here:
Hi, and welcome aboard! (I don’t usually write with exclamation points, so you can correctly infer that I’m thrilled to have you here.)
Here are a few ideas regarding our discussion: (more…)
A reader comments: You continue to repeat the myth of huge “oil subsidies”. Nearly anything that could be called a “subsidy” has long since disappeared or expired, but old conspiracy theories die hard.
This is simply not true. I urge all readers to go through the comprehensive report on the subject compiled by the Environmental Law Institute linked from this blog post. I spent a couple of hours in the office in Washington D.C. a few years ago, interviewing two of the report’s authors, and asking them tough questions about the veracity of what they had published and how they had arrived at their numbers. I came away somewhat exhausted, but completely impressed.
See summary slide below: (more…)
A reader comments: As a conservative environmentalist, I find the looney-right to be far less dangerous to public acceptance and support for positive environmental action than the environmental left. The left entwines leftist ideology with environmental issues. As a result, when the general public rejects the leftist dogma, unfortunately genuine environmental policies are also rejected. Your latest article, (while well-meaning and as always well-written), is just such an example ….
It is true that I am at once left of center politically and deeply committed to environmentalist values. (more…)
I just sent a letter to McDonald’s to congratulate them on their recent pledge to ensure the palm oil, beef, fiber-based packaging, coffee, and poultry in their products does not contribute to tropical deforestation. Apparently, their decision to head in the right decision here was the direct result of the work by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and its supporters who sent over 140,000 emails (including mine) to tell McDonald’s and the rest of America’s fast food chains that there’s no excuse to continue buying palm oil that could cause climate change, loss of endangered species habitat, and tropical deforestation. (more…)
Speaking for environmentalist baby-boomers everywhere, I hope the millennials reading this take a far more active role in environmental stewardship than my generation did. Obviously, I urge you to do your civic duty vis-à-vis voting, recycling, buying organic food from local farmers, boycotting the purveyors of poison and destruction (McDonalds, Coke, etc.), and so forth. But also, I hope a great number of you take one step further and aggressively resist the stupidity and corruption in the world around you and strive for all you’re worth to create a world of sustainability, peace, and justice. (more…)
Here’s the note I dictated into my phone this morning when I sat up in bed a few minutes pre-dawn and went through the features stories at RenewableEnergyWorld. I wrote, “This story on Azerbaijan is typical of ‘news coverage’ of things that haven’t happened and are extremely unlikely to occur. I could have written the same thing about Ghana or Sierra Leone, and have an equal chance of predicting the future: just this side of zero.” (more…)
