Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dr. Hall undertook a very difficult challenge: write an approachable and layman friendly introduction to energy and energy return on investment (EROI) and how they shape our world, bodies, ecosystems, and civilization. That he managed to pack this into a very readable 174 pages is quite the editorial feat!
City leaders are convinced that the same steps that Amsterdam must take to reduce and ultimately eliminate fossil fuels will also improve air quality, reduce traffic, make buildings more comfortable, and render the workforce more productive, all while saving citizens money.
For Marie-Eve, there is something very powerful about a lateral approach like this beer project. “It’s not a project that talks about climate change”, she told me. “It’s about water. And fun. It’s about having a beer for a cause, and it reaches into wider networks. One old man I met (and he was not sensitive to environmental issues) said “they can’t touch my beer!”, which for me was a great sign that we were doing it right”.
Analysis by Carbon Brief finds that if the US reneges on its Paris pledge and takes no action to reduce emissions, it could result in around 0.2C to 0.3C additional warming, whereas a delay in implementation of four or eight years would have minimal impact. Carbon Brief explains how these temperature estimates are made and explores the impacts of Paris, with and without US participation.
Industry and government claims that Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will boost prices for heavy Canadian crude have no basis in reality, says one of the nation’s top energy analysts. In a brief yet damning report David Hughes, a former federal government energy researcher, concluded that tripling the pipeline’s capacity won’t deliver an extra $73 billion in revenue over two decades as claimed by Kinder Morgan.
Transportation accounts for nearly a third of the country’s carbon emissions, of which 84 percent is attributed to cars and commercial trucks, the EPA reports. So, as Moyer sees it, it’s obvious that climate change and infrastructure should be tackled in tandem.
Households in the south-west of England are some of the most carbon intensive in Europe, a new study shows. The paper, published this month in the journal Environmental Research Letters, is the first to break down the embodied greenhouse gas emissions from household consumption across the EU.
In addition to being a much more powerful contributor to climate instability than carbon dioxide, methane leakage can contaminate groundwater, kill vegetation, create air pollution and waste valuable economic resources.
In addition to our deep dive on PURPA and around-market reforms, we’ll also discuss some of the likely implications of Trump’s new direction in energy policy, implications for the Clean Power Plan, and how the federal government’s leadership role on climate might be changing.
The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is ‘science’? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works. The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them.
“How can we reconcile our desire to save the planet from the worst effects of climate change with our dependence on the systems that cause it? How can we demand that industry and governments reduce their pollution, when ultimately we are the ones buying the polluting products and contributing to the emissions that harm our shared biosphere?”
However, determining whether storage can indeed solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar requires assessing the ‘energetic productivity’ of using energy storage in combination with variable renewables.
