In response to my piece: Government Subsidies for the Energy Industry in the U.S., senior energy analyst Glenn Doty makes these points which I’ve greatly abbreviated; I encourage readers to click on the link and read the whole enchilada. (more…)
I’m a huge fan of Annie Leonard (pictured) and her wonderful project “The Story of Stuff”; it has successfully communicated the follies of our robo-consumer society to many millions of people around the world in an elegant and charming way. I had the pleasure of listening to her speak a couple of years ago, and we had a nice chat after she left the stage. (more…)
Think motorized blinds, think electricity. Think electricity, don’t think green. This is the equation that has been drilled into most of us although surprisingly, it doesn’t always have to happen like this.
Let’s start with an introduction to motorized blinds. (more…)
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…)
