Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Yes, you can regulate markets, but that requires a regulator with both sufficient teeth and the nerve to use them, and one which does not believe that switching suppliers is the answer to all its problems.
Before 2005, US carbon emissions were marching upwards year after year, with little sign of slowing down. After this point, they fell quickly, declining 14% from their peak by the end of 2016. Researchers have given a number of different reasons for this marked turnaround.
As each ten-year milestone approaches – from the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 2008 to the G20 London Summit held on 2 April 2009 – much will be written about the role of each of the major culprits: the reckless bankers, the weak regulators, the captured credit rating agencies and the blind economists. But what about civil society? What is there to learn from the experience of the financial crisis, and what does this mean for the future of civil society?
As the world wonders what comes next in the North Korean missile crisis we need to have a look what a military confrontation would mean for Australia. This is important because after 3 refinery closures in Clyde (Sydney), Kurnell (Sydney) and Bulwer (Brisbane), fuel imports from East Asia have replaced previous crude imports coming from a variety of countries outside the Korean conflict zone.
Juan Parras gives one hell of a tour of Houston’s east side. He’s charming and funny. Wearing a beret, he strikes an old-world look, like he might lead you to a cafe on a plaza. He doesn’t charge a fee for his services. After all, you’re on a “toxic tour,” and Parras is on a mission.
When we hear about the emissions scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, do we really understand what they’re assuming about future fossil fuel combustion? And what do these emissions scenarios imply about the steps needed to achieve climate policy goals and decarbonize our energy system?
How to collect that solar energy, predict it, get it to the right places at the right time, save it up for a rainy day — those are the kind of challenges our massive, spread-out, and unevenly populated country faces as we make the switch to clean energy. And it all comes down to a lesson that the Evslins learned the hard way: It’s not about getting off the grid. It’s about building a better one.
Sometimes the most heated debates are among people who almost agree. That seems to be the case with the recent Jacobson-Clack controversy, in which two groups of well-intentioned, renewable energy advocates bitterly spar over differing paths to a 100% renewable energy future. But as PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg points out in his latest essay, neither side is considering one of the most crucial aspects to successfully reaching that future.
Tim Flannery drops into the studio and we discuss why, and talk about his new book (his second follow up to the highly influential The Weather Makers): Sunlight and Seaweed: An Argument For How To Feed, Power, and Clean Up The World.
But what does the transition mean for residents of Essen and the rest of the Ruhr region — the former industrial coal belt — whose lives and livelihoods have been dramatically altered by the reduced demand for coal? The answer to that could hold some useful lessons for those undergoing similar transitions elsewhere.
In this fourth episode of our climate science mini-series, we dive into the carbon cycle to understand how the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. We also discuss how climate science is taught, the concepts that students struggle to understand, and what the science of human reasoning and teaching can tell us about how best to communicate this enormously complex subject to a lay audience.
Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and offshore drilling garner a lot of news headlines when it comes to oil and gas issues in America, but they’re far from the only game in town, with those two drilling techniques not even constituting the majority of U.S. oil and gas production. For that, look to enhanced oil recovery (EOR), an under-regulated drilling method that has been around for over a century and could be threatening drinking water sources
